Baba is you, me, or anyone. Borders are whims of the powerful, after all, and the difference between a migrant and a citizen is a hastily drawn line on a map.

Halima Habil – Romanian-Moroccan, Gaulier-trained clown, understands this better than anyone. She’s worked with Clowns Without Borders in London, Bucharest, and Casablanca, and is – if this WIP is anything to go by – in the process of putting together a heartfelt but also very funny hour of theatre, slapstick, and clowning about migration, loss, and the concept of home.

Here, Baba is slightly curtailed by a very poor room for theatre. Separated from the rest of the pub by only a curtain, awkwardly shaped for performance, and with promoter Half a Camel’s traditionally quarter-arsed tech and audio set-up, the audience is nervous and not sufficiently insulated from the non-magical world of non-performance. Indeed, for parts of the show your correspondent can hear a drunk, reactionary woman in the bar, droning on about migrants, which adds strangeness and no little irony.

Habil’s portrayal of various generations of Babas – wise old woman in Romanian, or father in Arabic – brings us assorted archetypes but also universal experiences of love, loss, and living under communism in the 1980s. Between brilliant, surreal set-pieces, like Baba trying to get up onto a high stool while singing Lady In Red, or a Dogme 95 take on Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, we get a complete and very enjoyable breakdown of the audience / performer dichotomy, babies, shady lovers, and plenty of public transport.

Baba is slightly reminiscent of Julia Masli – no higher praise – in her ability to silence a room through a few, well-chosen, beautifully timed, and heavily accented words. In parts, here, it feels like the performance is almost too good, with some in the audience struggling to keep up with the glorious parade of skateboarding cleaners, pitiful but powerful dictators, and 1980s-perfect pop songs.

With the artist having to play her own music and audio prompts from a laptop, the show does suffer from a few awkward pauses. And one gets the feeling that this show could be slightly – but only slightly – more accessible, as it balances that line between theatre, clowning, and having something actually important to say. Baba’s next stop is Edinburgh, and is recommended to everyone, wherever you’re from and wherever you call home.