Dramatising Onjali Q Raúf’s refugee tale The Boy at the Back of the Class brought cheers and boos from a young audience – showing they can handle the truth

I’d never heard of The Boy at the Back of the Class before I was asked to adapt it in 2023. My son had just turned one when Onjali Q Raúf’s novel came into my life. While I could have recited every Julia Donaldson book in my sleep at the time, this would have been a little advanced for his reading age.

Since then, I have of course read the book and its impact is extraordinary. It follows a young Syrian boy, Ahmet, who arrives in the UK without his parents. He joins a school and befriends a group of kids who hear that the government is going to “close the gates”. They don’t fully understand what it means other than that Ahmet’s parents, who must be looking for him, won’t be able to get into the country. So they decide, in a beautifully innocent way, to go to the most powerful person they can think of – the queen! – and ask for help to find Ahmet’s parents and keep the gates open. There is a wonderful simplicity to the whole thing.