Tequila, sombreros, Mariachi, tortillas… Juana’s had enough of all that. What she wants is fish-and-chips, Billy Elliot and Buckingham Palace. Launched on her journey by a fiercely beating drum and a wild-as-the-wind Aztec dance, our heroine sets off from a small town in Mexico beset by economic depression and gang violence to seek out the bright lights of Londres. Passing through immigration is easier than she expects. She hopes for the fat and friendly-looking officer, and when she gets to the head of the line she says ‘tourist’ and gets through without any cross-examining.

The next hour or so whirls by in a wonderfully robust portrayal of the trials and tribulations of an illegal immigrant, the eponymous Juana, all weaved beautifully together with flashback memories from her life in Mexico – which include a truly terrifying enacted memory of the nightclub murder of her salsa-dancing boyfriend Pedro – and snippets from Mexico’s history and folklore. A recurring character conjured is La Malinche, the native Mexican woman who played a key role in the Spanish conquest of the country, an interpreter, intermediary and lover of conquistador Hernán Cortés. (‘We are all the sons and daughters of Malinche,’ says Juana, who is keen to dispute her mother’s constant harping back to past grievances, and blaming of all Mexico’s ills on the invaders. ‘The drug barons are not outsiders, they are Mexican!’ wails Juana.)

We see Juana ‘hot-bedding’ with a smelly woman called Guadalupe; sacked with no pay from Los Amigos, a Mexican restaurant in Elephant and Castle, when she kicks up a fuss about being groped in the kitchen (flashback to her restaurateur mother in Mexico saying, ‘But this is your restaurant here, why would you go and work in a restaurant there?’); and sorting shoes in a warehouse in Croydon, sent by a dodgy agency that disappears overnight without – you’ve guessed it – paying her a penny. Eventually she takes the only option she has left, and phones the seedy old guy without a dancing bone in his body she was fixed up with on a double-date. (‘Roger has money, all you have to do is spread your legs!” says her new friend Maria).

Countering the depressing nature of the stories told, the show sings with a vibrant energy, full of dance, rhythm, physical expression and humour. Performer Vicky Araico Casas and her ankle-belled onstage musician (Adam Pleeth, who plays drums, percussion, guitar and trumpet eloquently) are both excellent, and the piece is directed with due care and attention by Nir Paldi (of Theatre Ad Infinitum).

The mix of verbal storytelling and physical expression is perfectly pitched, and I particularly like the moments when words and movement motifs come together to create something akin to a highly physical performance poetry as, for example, in a show-stacking riff in which a repeated sequence of precisely mimed actions is accompanied by a litany of shoe colours: ‘… simply red, baby blue, navy blue, electric blue, apple green…’ The snippets of popular dance interspersed into the story also work very well, and the dream-space transition from sexy salsa dance to horror as the drug barons descend on the nightclub rolling human heads across the floor is done beautifully. This is a piece using a lot of text, but the physical performance is intrinsic to the piece, and built into the dramaturgy. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, the piece reminds me of Theatre Ad Infinitum’s work, and it bears evidence of the same rigorous writing, devising and performing processes.

A gorgeous piece of theatre, shining a bright and colourful light on a difficult subject. If you’d had told me that a tale of illegal immigration and oppression would be one of the most heart-lifting shows in the Fringe, I might not have believed you – but here it is!