A history lesson well worth attending
It’s a textbook example of bringing to light a fascinating subject while avoiding coercive simplification
The Whip
RSC Swan, Stratford-upon-avon
★★★★★ Dominic Cavendish
There’s a mini boom in history plays and period dramas in our theatre and it’s one to be welcomed, throwing up ideas, knowledge, energy. The risk is the aura of the classroom, but better that than the subject matter gets handled in too flip and free a manner. The Whip, by Juliet Gilkes Romero, dealing with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, with emphasis on the issue of remuneration for slave owners, is a textbook example of how to bring to light a fascinating subject while avoiding coercive simplification – if the result is a little unwieldy that’s a price worth paying.
While the evening doesn’t let anyone escape without feeling a due sense of horror – and inherited guilt – at the slave trade, the approach is remarkably even-handed and refreshingly rigorous. Empathy not ideology is to the fore, and that empathy extends to the labouring poor of the period. Romero ties in the campaign for abolition with the concurrent push to alleviate the conditions of children working in factories, whose toil was akin to slavery.
She funnels these competing claims to parliamentary attention through a fictional protagonist in the shape of Alexander Boyd, Chief Whip (titular allusion, and thereby pun, intended) for the Whigs. At the outset, this privileged but socially committed reformer (played with a fine mixture of amused detachment and world-weary gravity by Richard Clothier) is found at the House of Commons, bewailing the “privation of infants”. He takes into his household an ex-cotton worker from Bradford, Katherine Pearce’s dartingly forthright Horatia, whose child died at a mill, but the political momentum inclines towards sorting out abolition first – and Boyd begins a tortuous process of murky compromise as it becomes clear that the end of slavery can only be agreed if colossal sums are found to reimburse the slave owners (some of whom sit in parliament).
Romero’s interest was initially piqued by a tweet from the Treasury in 2015 that the compensation debt (about £20billion in today’s money) had finally been paid off. Her use of the word “bail-out” emphasises the way, through history, the burden of sorting out economic messes seems to fall least on those who have most to answer for. Yet her gaze remains primarily fixed on characters’ quandaries.
That brings depth to the whipscarred abolitionist Mercy Pryce (modelled on the Bermudan campaigner Mary Prince and played with bright force by Debbie Korley) and Boyd’s secretary Edmund, a runaway slave (Corey Montague-sholay). Their interiority contrasts enjoyably with sundry superficial asinine Tories.
If the gain is detail, the loss is that at times the production (directed by Kimberley Sykes with characteristic visual élan) feels a bit like getting a bill through the House of Commons: you can’t always see the wood for the trees. Cracking the whip on the running time (two hours 45 minutes) might help, but all in all this is a solid, satisfying credit to all concerned at the RSC.
Until March 21. Tickets: 01789 331111; rsc.org.uk