Philip Key looks at a new play detailing the plight of black soldiers in the American War of Independence

FOR years, it had remained just a footnote in history. But the story of the black American slaves who fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence has long been a tale worth telling.

It was left to television historian Simon Schama to record their full and terrifying story in his book, Rough Crossings, which later became a television drama documentary of the same title.

It has now become a stage drama co-produced by the Liverpool Playhouse, which goes on stage there for a two-week run from Tuesday.

For noted academic Schama, the man who created the 15-part television series A History of Britain, it has been his introduction to the world of theatre and a fascinating one.

He went to some of the rehearsals and, when it opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he went to see the drama a number of times, he tells me from his New York office.

London-born, 62, and now living in the USA, where he is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University, for Schama the story of the play really began when he was researching a book on the relationship between Britain and America after the War of Independence.

“I was looking through a very good history of New York, titled Gotham, by Michael Wallace, and stumbled over this story that at the end of the revolutionary war there were thousands of blacks in New York who had been in the British Army and were terrified because the Americans had won and they thought they would be sent back to the plantations.”

He knew nothing about the black soldiers, sappers and engineers. “The British had only around 50,000 troops of any sort and on our side a good third of them were black. It was an amazing revelation.”

He went from the book back into the archives and uncovered an astonishing story. “It was a story that took over my life for two years.”

He discovered that the British, having promised to look after the black soldiers, shipped many of them to Nova Scotia. When that did not work out, a bold plan was developed to ship them to Africa and settle them in Sierra Leone.

Despite the good intentions, it was not a happy outcome for many of the former slaves who died in the voyaging, were recaptured, or found their new lands unwelcoming. It was an epic story that does not seem totally suitable for stage adaptation, but in-vogue theatre director Rupert Goold (whose Macbeth with Patrick Stewart has been one of the successes of the London season) was convinced it could be done.

He took on board black novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips to do the adaptation, and they met Schama in New York. Schama gave the go-ahead despite some reserv- ations and sat in on rehearsals. “Rather sweetly, the cast wanted me to talk about the book and I was happy to do that although I felt like a Professor conducting a seminar.”

Although he did have comments to make as rehearsals progressed – “certain little things I suggested did make it into the production, which I was very happy about” – he was quite aware that it was going to be a play by Caryl Phillips.

“I just gave him space to do what he wanted,” says Schama. “I did not expect the stage version to be a dramatised documentary, that would not work. So I was relaxed about the issue of inventing and manipulating all sorts of things. That’s the way it had to be.”

Although the drama does use real people, there are obvious fictionalisations. “We do know a lot about the black leader Thomas Peters, but not what he said, so words have to be used suggesting what he might have said.”

It did lead to what Schama considers a slight alteration in the characters of some of the important figures in the saga, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp.

“In a scene where he meets Thomas Peters, he is shown to be slightly reticent about adopting Thomas’s cause to take dissatisfied blacks from Nova Scotia to Africa. That was not the case at all, quite the opposite and Granville was gung-ho about it.”

More reticent, according to Schama, was the Royal Navy captain John Clarkson, who undertook the voyage, shown to be something of a hero in the play.

Peters is shown as a black militant. “That’s how Caryl wanted him to be to make it more dramatic, to make him an emblem. I think Peters was more interesting, as he started off totally devoted to the British, but the version you get in the play is that he was always deeply sceptical about British good intentions.”