Rockets And Blue Lights was premiering at The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in March when theatres were told to cancel further performances and close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Four productions were therefore chosen to be part of a special weekend 'Lockdown Theatre Festival' in which the actors and actresses recorded their parts in isolation and were then edited and put together in a slightly rewritten form to accommodate the new medium of radio, and were aired over the weekend on radio 3 and 4. Rockets And Blue Lights had had only three preview performances and had not even had a press night before the theatre had to close.
Rockets And Blue Lights is a drama by Winsome Pinnock, which in her own words, is a very perosnal piece of writing for her, since she has evry personal history with both the transatlantic slave trade, being directly descended from slaves, and the painting "The Slave Ship" by Turner, above.
"The descendants of slaves have a duty to tell their stories."
The play takes the painting as its starting point. It shows a slave ship in tumultuous waters, whilst slaves are throwing both the dead and the dying overboard. A large character-play with most performers playing more than one role, and spanning three different times and places, it is a rather confusing play, and to be honest doesn't realy fair that well on radio. I feel one really needs some visuals to go with this; it's a difficult listen and hard to follow; however I stayed with it and it did offer up rewards by so doing. You just have to concentrate and not let your mind be sidetracked at all.
A narator takes us through the scene changes and the time zones, so that helps enormously, but with strong language and very graphic sexual references which would undoubtedly have worked better on stage; especially the part where we explore, albeit very briefly, Turner's sexual perversions and his madness; obsessed with his mother in Bedlam. I believe these needed further exploration for the radio.
The play takes us through three different events, switching un-chronologically between the three, showing snippets of each back and forth, and only towards the end do we get a sense of why these snippets were put in that particular order. We learn bits and understand more, and so our comprehension of each scene deepens with our knowledge of what happens in the other two.
One is in 2007, where the play starts. Two women looking at and discussing the painting 'The Slave Ship'. The second is a few months' earlier (say 2006) at a rehearsal in London for a new film, 'The Ghost Ship' which is a film about Turner to cleberate the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act; whilst the third is back in 1840 and we hear William Turner himself, and his experiences with painting, slaves, and slave ships. In particular two people who touch his life at this point, Danby, and a young black sailor called Thomas.
The thrust of the piece however is the film rehearsal. The leading actress, Lou, is a famous American star, and wants the black story to be told with truth and sympathy, whilst the director and producer seem to care more for telling the story from the white perspective and brushing over many of the issues important to both the blacks and their story. In the words of the film's director, "It is about the ship and not about the blacks!" And so Lou feels deserted and abandonded by her own story.
The play is about the experiences of the slaves and the legacy that slavery has left. And it's not a happy story. A timely piece of theatre - especially right now with all that has been happening in the world recently with the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. It's a very brave piece, but ultimately I felt - obviously - that it would have worked far better on a stage (where it belongs!) - but nevertheless, it serves as a wonderful record of a production that wouldn't otherwise have been recorded.
With music by Femi Tomowo and directed by Miranda Cromwell, 10 performers play 24 characters,and the main cast were Paul Bradley (Turner and others), Anthony Aje (Billie and others), Karl Collins (Thomas and others) and Kirza Deen (Lou and others).
Reviewer - Chris Benchley
on - 14/6/20
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