Theatre Review: Rough Crossings, Liverpool Playhouse

Oct 18 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Scene from the play, Rough Crossings, at the Liverpool Playhouse _320

IT’S amazing how shocking the N-word can seem when spoken openly by a white man, even if that man is in character playing an 18th century slaver treating Africans as cargo.

From its dramatic stormy opening – with sailors and slaves rolling down a tilting stage symbolising a ship on the high seas – to its bitter-sweet conclusion, Rough Crossings is packed with shock value.

Based on historian Simon Schama’s book of the same name, which later became a TV docu-drama, the play swings between the American slaves fighting on the side of the British during the War of Independence and the Englishmen fighting for their emancipation across the Atlantic.

Both groups will inevitably come together in a common cause, to discover they have as many differences in perspective as similarities. And among men of the same complexion there is still dissent.

The action follows a small group of slaves from their decision to run away from the plantations to join the British army, through their struggles to cope with the bitter conditions of Nova Scotia where they have been guaranteed a new life.

Finally, under the leadership of former slave Thomas Peters (Patrick Robinson), they elect to live in a newly-established community in Sierra Leone where they are to be given their own land and expect to make their own laws.

Robinson (who played Ash in BBC drama Casualty) is haunting as Peters, his eyes expressing his fierce determination to answer to no self-imposed leader, particularly one who is white.

A strong cast and ingenious set, with a stage that tips up and down as the action plays out, as well as musical pieces makes watching Rough Crossings a powerful experience.

There are some thoughtful touches too – such as the black actors becoming a physical part of a library table or ship, demonstrating how slavery held together the British Empire. But the play’s greatest strength is taking facts with which we have been familiar since childhood – the cramped conditions of the slave decks, the harsh treatment of black people by whites – and representing them to the audience in a way that makes them newly shocking.

As Peters says of the abolitionists: “For them ‘freedom’ is a principle. For us it is a matter of life and death.”

* ROUGH Crossings runs until Saturday, October 27.