Composer John Pfumojena’s music draws upon the sounds of African percussion, most notably in a memorable arrangement of the famous Scottish folk song, The Parting Glass. If you take the court documents at face value, he genuinely felt he was behaving in a compassionate way.

May Sumbwanyambe is an award-winning playwright who is currently writing new stage plays, radio plays, operas and musicals on commission to The National Theatre of Scotland, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Scottish Opera and the BBC. The Rocky Horror Show, Richard O'Brien's legendary rock 'n' roll musical, is back to thrill you once again at The Pavilion Theatre Glasgow in 2024! It is an excellent, harrowing and ultimately uplifting drama about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the struggle against it.The National Theatre of Scotland makes its debut at Pitlochry Festival Theatre with a highly appropriate piece of historical drama. It could be said that the highs and lows of the ensuing battle for Knight’s freedom (we all love a courtroom drama) were somewhat glossed over in the final few minutes. A new play, which has been four years in the making, will make its highly anticipated debut performance next week at Live Theatre in Newcastle.

And both the BBC and The Times have named the play in their lists of shows you won’t want to miss in 2020/Cultural Highlights of the year to come. His colonial experiences in the Caribbean have so disturbed him that he has contracted Margaret never to mention Jamaica. They register anonymous statistical data on for example how many times the video is displayed and what settings are used for playback.

He confesses to his wife—played with subtlety by Rachael-Rose McLaren—that he cannot have a healthy sexual life due to the hideously violent sadism of his relations with black slave women in the Caribbean colony. Read more about the condition New: An item that is still in its original shrink wrap from the manufacturer and the original manufacturer’s seal (if applicable) has not been removed. The thing that has shocked me is it’s been relatively easy to chart out the stories of black men and their allyship with white working-class women, because they are there in the archives, but with black women, their lives haven’t appeared to be important enough even to record. Enough Of Him is just one of a suite of plays Sumbwanyambe has in mind about Scotland’s forgotten history. Set at Ballindean – the Perthshire mansion of Knight’s “owner” Sir John Wedderburn, whose fortune was made in the sugar plantations of Jamaica – this is a powerful and pungent 80 minutes of drama.

Instead, his National Theatre Of Scotland play Enough Of Him brings together four people in an uneasy status game. Cumbernauld Theatre Trust is s upported by Creative Scotland, North Lanarkshire Council and the Weston Culture Fund. This cookies is installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request rate to limit the colllection of data on high traffic sites.When you choose to create a user account and follow a newsroom your personal data will be used by us and the owner of the newsroom, for you to receive news and updates according to your subscription settings. Encircling on Knight, whose struggle with owner Wedderburn went on to stamp legal history when Knight won his freedom: but freedom is more complex than physical bondage. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visted in an anonymous form. Knight—played with tremendous dignity, humour and controlled anguish by Omar Austin—lives with that trauma.

Where the visible shackles are gone, those of memory and ignorance retain their weight, holding us back from genuine progress. Once again, the new Studio performance space at Pitlochry provides the ideal setting with the backdrop of a huge picture frame also doubling as a canvas for atmospheric lighting by Emma Jones. A confrontational, intelligent, and harrowing openness to engage and preserve weaves Knight’s history so deftly through the remainder of the cast without diluting the intensity or rhythm of the script and is mesmeric to watch – both in its discomfort and moments of exultant solace.The corrupting impact of slavery extends to the housemaid Annie (Catriona Faint), whose status in this fraught household is lower than that of Knight, her future husband. Although set in Scotland, memories of the hell on Earth that was the slave colony in Jamaica are ever present in Knight and Wedderburn’s minds. And the sexual dysfunction, well, maybe that has something to do with Wedderburn’s 10 years in Jamaica where his appetite for human “bed warmers” was characterised by violence and humiliation.