Women of Llanrumney at Stratford East review: this Welsh slave drama is bold, horrific and remarkably assured
For a debut play, Azuka Oforka’s story about a Welsh-owned slave plantation in 1765 is remarkably assured. It’s bold in the way it successfully treats horrific subject matter with a mixture of mordant wit, melodrama and deliberately anachronistic absurdism. Patricia Logue’s production, originally staged at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, is pacy and gripping.
Yes, the play is explanatory, but I learned a lot. Culture warriors who want to soft-pedal the racist brutalities of colonialism should feel absolutely schooled by it.
As the title suggests, it focuses on a woman plantation owner, Elisabeth (Nia Roberts), her housekeeper Annie (Suzanne Packer) and Cerys (Shvorne Marks), newly promoted to house slave from the punishing cane fields. The three predatory white male characters are subsidiary, and all played for greater or lesser comic effect by Matthew Gravelle.
Llanrumney plantation was founded by the Welsh pirate Captain Morgan in the 1600s, producing sugar to make molasses to make rum. In Oforka’s tale it has passed to the unmarried and childless Elisabeth, who enjoys a license among the tiny white “plantocracy” that she would not have back in the valleys.
Elisabeth spends her days drinking (rum punch immediately after morning coffee), eating (“first breakfast, second breakfast, luncheon, dinner, tea, supper”) and selectively fornicating. She rules her slaves cruelly but has let the estate go to rack and ruin.
Annie was the issue of a rape by an earlier Morgan “master” and therefore is Elisabeth’s distant relative as well as her chattel. By serving her mistress’s every want and acting as “confidante” she hopes to win her freedom.
Cerys is the daughter Annie turned her back on, so as not to again suffer love and loss, as she did when her own mother was slowly starved, then coated with hot molasses and left for the insects by her rapist. Cerys, herself pregnant with a baby that will be taken from her and sold, burns for the coming rebellion. The choice is stark: war or a possible, provisional liberty.
This makes for potent, compelling drama and most of it is conveyed in terse, tense exchanges of muttered patois between Annie and Cerys each time they set the dining table. Oforka is also an actress, and she absolutely understands the rhythm of dialogue and the pacing of narrative. Packer gives Annie a gnarled and defeated dignity, while Marks’s Cerys is haunted, harsh and resolute. Each time Roberts enters the action it’s like a drunk has thrown a firecracker into the room.
Hers is a barnstorming performance, redolent of Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in Blackadder in its combination of absolute power and bratty self-indulgence, but with more F-bombs and jarringly modern-sounding verbiage. It’s totally out of kilter with the rest of the show - even Gravelle’s trio of cartoon vultures, circling over Elisabeth’s misfortune.
Yet it works. Elizabeth’s clownish misbehaviour, and complaints about the indignities she suffers as a white woman, throw the obscenity of the wider situation into sharp relief.
The final scenes overegg the reckoning that’s been coming. Stella-Jane Odoemelam’s set of a dining room and vine-traced verandah above is pretty basic. It doesn’t matter. This is an auspicious debut about an important subject that marks Oforka as a talent to watch.
Theatre Royal Stratford East, to April 12; stratfordeast.com
