Henry “Box” Brown is wrapped up in chains when he has an idea to claim his freedom. As inspiration hits him, actor Josiah Alpher flexes his muscles and, miraculously, the chains appear to pass through his neck. Magic!
It is a neat visual metaphor for a true story that seems miraculous in itself. In 1849, Brown made a break to flee slavery near Richmond, Virginia, by posting himself in a wooden crate to Philadelphia, a state where ownership of human beings had been phased out by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Alpher describes a painful journey, squashed, upturned and knocked about, before Brown’s happy delivery.
Rickerby Hinds’s staging of his own play uses the language of stage magic, from the glamorous magician’s assistant (Jada Evelyn Ramsey) to the knotted rope trick, to emphasise how extraordinary this escape was. Brown gets into the box as if he were Harry Houdini performing a stunt.
Hinds shows too how the bonds of US slavery were not just represented by physical chains: they extended to a church that sanctioned the practice and to the constant threat of whipping, a nagging psychological burden.
All this is duly itemised in a script that tells Brown’s story before his break for freedom, not only the callous treatment at the hands of his owner, but also accounts of conditions even worse than his own.
It is weighty material but it is lessened in three ways. The story is recounted rather than dramatised and were it not for the magic tricks would seem theatrically flat. The actors hit an impressively breakneck speed, but perform without tonal variation, making it hard to keep up. And the story ends where you might expect it to begin, with Henry “Box” Brown’s entry into a new life.
• At Underbelly, Edinburgh, until 30 August
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