Review: The Meaning of Zong, Bristol Old Vic – ‘a powerful, vital play’

Giles Terera has been working to get his debut play The Meaning of Zong onto the stage for over six years.

Within that time it has had another life as an hour-long radio play, but it is in the theatre that the story becomes transcendent.

A sparkling cast retell the true and harrowing account of a massacre on board the British slave ship Zong in 1781, and the subsequent campaigning from two men, Granville Sharp (Paul Higgins) and Olaudah Equiano (Terera), that set in motion the beginnings of the abolitionist movement in Britain.

(l-r) Giles Terera as Equiano and Paul Higgins as Granville Sharp – photo: Curtis Richard

Setting the pulsating tone for what follows, on stage musician Sidiki Dembele brings the audience along from the very beginning, with an invitation to clap along to his rhythms.

From the acapella singing, tapping and drumming – on chairs, and planks – from the ensemble, to Dembele’s traditional West African instruments, the music operates as another character that is woven deeply through the fabric of the play.

The elegant and pared down staging allows for jumps around in time and place while suggesting the causality and connection that abounds throughout the narrative. And the complexity of interwoven stories compels us to participate more fully as agents of positive change in our own lives.

“Inaction is a form of brutality”, we are told. Thus the planks of the boat become Sharp’s home, and the rafters of Westminster Hall become the upturned hull of the Zong.

History is a living entity in this play that can be shaped and changed by actions of individuals that reverberate across the decades, and centuries, to come.

Kiera Lester as Ama – photo: Curtis Richard

The backward and forward motion in time allows the protagonists to address one another across temporal divides and give voice to those who where never heard.

But the silence, too, is deafening, and the King’s Bench appeal hearing plays out in front of a Lord Chief Justice and two judges who are all either themselves, or related to, slave owners. Equiano and Sharp are striving for change at a time when “the church is deaf and the law is silent”.

Yet the nuances of the play are deftly judged. The poorly paid sailors who carried out the atrocity are themselves shown to be trapped. We observe Sharp’s sexism and misogyny, and Ottobah Cugoano (Michael Elcock)’s continued suggestion that Equiano’s relationship with a white woman is problematic; we see too, Annie Greenwood (Eliza Smith)’s struggle to be taken seriously, as well as her initial, privileged choice to turn away from the horrors of the massacre.

And the play begins and ends with the contemporary bookshop manager who, by placing the book in the African History section, is perpetuating a culture of disavowment for over 200 years of brutality at British hands, would rather not get involved in a conversation about it. The question of who is complicit, and who is accountable, underpins the entire narrative.

MIchael Elcock as Ottobah Cugoano – photo: Curtis Richard

Co-directing with Tom Morris, Terera also wrote the play, and is a magnetic and near-constant presence as Equiano, whether as part of the action, or observing as the near-past, and the far-future, plays out in front of him.

The most affecting scenes involve Kiera Lester as Ama, Bethan Mary-James as Joyi, and Alice Vilanculo as Riba – three enslaved women on the Zong connecting through their common humanity, their shared stories of food and cooking, and finding some escapism in the darkest of times.

It’s emotional, and confronting. But as Terera writes in the programme, “for me, it was about finding a way to tell this story so that the audience could listen to it, hear it, see it without fear”.

And he has achieved it – The Meaning of Zong has far-reaching and historic roots, but it is unequivocally a story for our time, too.

(l-r) Bethan Mary-James as Joyi and Alice Vilanculo as Riba – photo: Curtis Richard

The Meaning of Zong is at Bristol Old Vic from April 2-May 7 (a split run of April 2-9 and April 26-May 7, at 7.30pm, with additional Saturday matinee shows at 2.30pm. Tickets are available at www.bristololdvic.org.uk, with a two-for-one ticket deal available for performances in April thanks to the National Lottery’s Love your Local Theatre campaign.

Main photo: Curtis Richard

Read more: Giles Terera on ‘The Meaning of Zong’

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