Theatre

How you bring the magnitude of the transatlantic slave trade to the small stage is a question relatively few theatremakers have dared to answer; successfully, even fewer still. And as last year’s bicentenary of the 1807 Slave Trade Act so ably demonstrated, popular culture has reframed slavery as a historical occurrence that benevolent white men stopped, rather than something that African people endured or were equally instrumental in ending.

This makes Richard Nyeila’s from-the-perspective-of-a-black-woman tale of the Maafa (Swahili for ‘the disaster’) even more commendable in its intention and disappointing in its execution. As the publicity material states, ‘Celia’ is based on a true story of a young slave who is executed for murdering her master. Know that and you spend the entire evening waiting for something which happens in the last 15 minutes.

If Nyeila had started with the ending, explored the impact of Celia’s execution (which was ‘instrumental in bringing an end to the practice of slavery’ according to the producers) or provided some onstage context, the convoluted linear narrative would’ve been helped. But even restructuring wouldn’t hide the fact that Nyeila seems so driven to provide a historical account of this unsung heroine that he and director Malcolm Frederick have forgotten the drama.