Olaudah Equiano is an elusive kind of hero: a victim of the English slave trade who became a drawing-room curiosity, the first black author to be published in English, and a pioneering Arctic explorer to boot. It would be all too easy to eulogise Equiano, yet the most remarkable aspect of Christopher Rodriguez's tale of black and white is that there is nothing black and white about it. A bestseller in his day, obscure in our own, the broad picture of Equiano's incredible autobiography is waiting to be dramatised. This isn't it.
Rodriguez, Trinidad's most promising contemporary playwright, forsakes sequential storytelling in favour of a concise, high-keyed character study of a scarred and flawed personality. Fifth Column Theatre's production merely alludes to the basic facts of the hero's life in the process of delving into a deeply troubled conscience and exposing some surprisingly inglorious motives. It's a bold experiment which just about overcomes its endemic confusion.
Polite drawing-room locutions are suddenly interrupted by ethnic reminiscence, as if the pages of Jane Austen and Ben Okri had bizarrely interleaved. Equiano remains, however, a man who breaks so many moulds that it is no surprise if the broad outline of his character seems formless.
The success of the evening depends upon the iron will of the excellent Tunde Euba, who injects his portrait of the hero with fortified solidity. Euba makes a dramatic virtue of introspection within a narrative more concerned with Equiano's anxieties than his achievements. Foremost among these is a morbid obsession with posterity: the action is framed by the hero sitting for his portrait, nagging the unseen artist to register the right degree of melancholy, in order that it indicates his powerful intellect.
Euba is superb at conveying the strangely shallow vanity of a reticent icon who appears to have grown weary of his own accomplishment. Diligently tracing Rodriguez's occasionally tangled thread, Euba persuasively marks Equiano's progress from dire hardship to material contentment - only to find comfort the most discomforting state of all.
Ends tonight. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then touring to Winchester, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham.
