Nervous anticipation was felt throughout the Dorfman theatre at the Saturday matinee of Rockets and Blue Lights I attended, as the audience not only readied themselves for a poignant reflection of black history in Britain, but for one of their first in person theatre productions since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The original run of Winsome Pinnock’s play at the Manchester Royal Exchange was interrupted due to the pandemic, but the conversations that erupted during the George Floyd protests of summer 2020 has given the piece even more weight to Pinnock’s dramatisation of slavery, racism and black history in the historical imagination.
The play is an emotional odyssey of black experience in Britain stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present day that ebbs and flows seamlessly across centuries and stories. It opens on a discussion in the present between actress Lou (Kiza Dean) and teacher Essie (Rochelle Rose) on the JMW Turner painting A Slave Ship. Turner’s painting was based on events onboard the slave ship Zong, where crew members murdered over 130 African slaves in order to ration fresh water. From here, the play splits itself across multiple storylines, traversing Turner’s life (Paul Bradley), young people’s reactions to black history, the story of a family torn in two by slavery, but also the experiences of Lou acting in a present-day biopic of Turner. The stories frequently shared the stage, fliting between past, present, and imagined past, stressing the dichotomy between conventional contemporary interpretation and the pursuit of historical reality. With the film at the story’s centre, Lou’s character become a portal through which the variety and richness of black experience in Britain are brought to life, whilst also discussing the difficulty of black people taking part in a film project in which changes to the script become more reminiscent of films written by white people about black trauma.
The ensemble worked well together to bring this piece to life. Unfortunately however, both the actress and the understudy for Jess/Jeanie were unable to make the performance I saw so the Staff Director (Mumba Dodwell) read in, undeniably disrupting the flow of the piece. This was more than made up for with the absorbing moments between individual characters, particularly the moments between husband and wife, Thomas (Karl Collins) and Lucy, and between Lou and her Grandfather (Everal A Walsh).
The inherent value of this piece lies in its questioning of the white gaze, and how this has persisted through time as one of the only ways Britons experience black history. Both Turner and Roy, the actor who plays Turner in the film, disrupt the narrative truth to place themselves at the account’s centre, making their guilt and their interpretation the perceived ‘truth’. The white man evades culpability and repercussions, and all that remains is his pictorial attempt to absolve himself from this guilt. The ‘torture porn’ Lou refers to when discussing the film of Turner’s life has not only been a common attribute of films about slavery, often reflecting the history of the United States, but it is also the primary way Britons experience black history. Pinnock’s play is an attempt to remedy this, with unique narratives that intertwine and link to the many stories and histories of black Britons.
The performance was immersed with striking visual symbolism, with a stunning set design by Laura Hopkins and powerful lighting design by Jessica Hung Han Yun. As the white deck of the set slowly filled with water, the end of the performance came to an emotional crescendo bathed in orange light, a tribute to black lives lost in Britain, and a plea for change. No review of this show would be complete without mentioning the composer Femi Temowo, whose sea shanties brought the cast together as they traversed years and narratives. At times the play-text felt more interesting than the production, but nonetheless this was a great ensemble piece that is undoubtedly worth seeing.
At a time when the government and media minister John Wittingdale is stressing the UK’s public broadcasters to make ‘British’ television, one has to look no further than Pinnock’s play to appreciate the work needed to amend the gaps in stories and representations of Britain’s past.
Performance Date: 4th September Matinée
Image Rights: By After J. M. W. Turner - https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/38/48/9e35693f0e1b2a9ad034d8d76ec5.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0041160.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-02): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/wnpc6any CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36643410
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