Nobody loves to imply they didn’t have anything to do with slavery more than the British. Admittedly we were less enthusiastic about it than noted spin-off nation the USA. But you can’t boast about how early you were to abolish something without having been pretty into it in the first place.
Azuka Oforka’s uneven but engrossing play ruthlessly pushes the surface incongruity of the fact that it’s set in an 18th-century Jamaican sugar plantation with the none-more-Welsh name of Llanrumney. Though Oforka’s characters are fictional, Llanrumney is a real place that was owned by the Welsh Morgan family. The play premiered last year at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, and clearly tying Wales to slavery is a potent gesture in front of a Welsh audience that can’t quite be replicated here. Nonetheless, the English are not wriggling out of this one.
It’s a play with a lot of moving parts, which eases us in by starting with the fraught relationship between slaves Annie (Suzanne Packer) and Cerys (Shvorne Marks). Annie is Llanrumney’s housekeeper and the illegitimate daughter of its late owner. Cerys is her barely acknowledged daughter. It’s 1765, just four years after huge slave revolt Tacky’s rebellion, and the threat of violence hangs in the air. Annie is of the mindset that it‘s best to make herself indispensable to the whites in exchange for a better life and elevated hopes of manumission. Cerys dreams of rebellion and the end to the oppressive status quo.
But though they have our sympathies, the main engine of the story is Nia Roberts’s plantation owner Elisabeth. A boozy society queen who revels in the freedoms that Jamaica affords a (white) woman, she soon comes crashing back to ground when her crop fails.
It’s a fascinating look at a period in British history usually kept under lock and key, a frontier planter society of appalling racism, big money, relaxed rules and simmering threat. But while Oforka and director Patricia Logue are great at the broad brushstroke big picture stuff, the characterisation is shakier.
Elisabeth is the trickiest character. Roberts plays her broad, silly and cruel, with the vocal cadences and childish petulance of Miranda Richardson in Blackadder. The cartoonishness of her turn next to the naturalism of Packer and Marks feels jarring. And after a while Oforka’s play settles into a rhythm of Elisabeth getting her comeuppance, again and again.
Early on Oforka highlights the irony that Elisabeth flourishes with the freedom colonial life brings her, freedom a woman would not experience back home. And yet there’s no real depth to her character - she’s preposterous and unsympathetic. But is it great that she ends up suffering so much at the hands of the white men on the island, while they get to act with impunity? I think she’s intended to be an intersectional figure, but it all comes across as extremely heavy handed.
Meanwhile Annie and Cerys’s relationship is didactic and exposition heavy; tying the development of their mother-daughter bond to the fast-paced developments in Elisabeth’s struggle to maintain the estate feels like it rushes things illogically.
The Women of Llanrumney is an interesting and heartfelt debut play. At its best it offers a subversion of British period drama cliches and the romanticisation of master-servant relations within the genre.I’d say the characters aren’t quite there yet. But it’s a window into a period in history that could do with a good deal more light thrown upon it still.
