This is truly epic theatre. Adapted by Caryl Phillips from Simon Schama's enthralling book about the slave trade, it traverses three continents and covers 15 years of history. Although three hours is not enough to tell the full story, Rupert Goold's production for Headlong reveals his mastery of stagecraft.
Phillips has shrewdly extracted a key theme from Schama's book: the conflict between benevolent white liberalism and emerging African-American political consciousness. In the first half, we watch the strenuous efforts of Granville Sharp and others to fight for black freedom under British law. But Phillips's main theme emerges after the interval. John Clarkson, an idealistic naval officer, leads a group of black refugees who fought alongside Brits in the American war of independence. His aim is to create a new utopia based on racial equality but he is betrayed by his white paymasters and opposed by Thomas Peters, who has a wider vision of black self-determination.
Compression leads to short cuts: when, for instance, Clarkson was close to death on the journey to Freetown, he handed over command to his white lieutenant rather than, as here, to the charismatic black Christian, David George. But what Phillips makes clear is that there were battles within, as well as between, the black and white communities. Patrick Robinson's towering, separatist Peters is opposed by Peter De Jersey's accommodating, God-fearing George in a conflict that prefigures that of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Among the whites, the naive optimism of Ed Hughes's Clarkson is confronted in Sierra Leone by the residual racism of Mark Jax's company agent.
Like all good plays about the past, this one has resonance for the present. Goold's production also displays the driving clarity of his current Macbeth: in a typically imaginative touch, the upright wooden staves symbolising the prison in which Peters is detained turn instantly into waving branches denoting Clarkson's troubled conscience. Laura Hopkins's tilting platform, beautifully lit by Paul Pyant, whisks us in a second from Canada to Africa to England. And the central cultural divide is exactly caught by Adam Cork's music which embraces woodwind-dominated, Handelian soirees among the abolitionists and drum-driven ballads from those being shipped to Sierra Leone. The result is vivid narrative theatre that opens our eyes both to the neglected past and the lingering inheritance of black enslavement.
· Until October 13. Box office: 08700 500511. Then touring.
