Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Women of Llanrumney sounds like a tale from the Welsh valleys — and in a sense it is. Azuka Oforka’s blistering first play focuses on a grim episode in Welsh history: involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Sharp and shocking, Oforka’s script fuses fictional characters with real events to powerful and resonant effect. Not all the stylistic jumps from horror to comedy work, but it’s still an impressive debut.We’re in the “Great House” on the Llanrumney plantation, St Mary Parish, Jamaica, on the eve of the 1765 Blackwall’s revolt. The owner here is Elisabeth Morgan. A relative of the previous owner, Sir Henry Morgan (she is imagined, he and the plantation are not), she has run herself into debt through drinking, gambling and general high living, failing to notice that the sugar crop is blighted. Now she is suddenly faced with ruin.As she scrabbles to save herself, we watch through the eyes of two women whose lives depend on her decisions but who have no say in the matter: Annie, an enslaved woman who has worked her way up to housekeeper and hopes that, by getting close to her mistress, she can gain her freedom; and Cerys, Annie’s pregnant daughter, newly promoted to the household and therefore vividly aware of the brutalities of the cane fields.While they polish silver and wheel great platters of food around, the two enslaved women talk passionately of freedom. “Freedom can’t be handed on from one person to another on no piece of paper,” says Cerys, arguing for rebellion. But Annie, who knows from bitter personal experience how slave-masters punish those who rise up against them, can’t let herself dream of resistance. Meanwhile, Elisabeth is soon brought up hard against the limits of her own autonomy, as various men name their grubby price for getting her out of financial catastrophe.Oforka weaves the idea of freedom through the play, introducing characters with differing levels of agency and illustrating the multiple examples of inhumanity in an abhorrent system built on exploitation. But while the rules of patriarchy and capitalism trap some of the white characters, it is, of course, the Black people who are grotesquely abused. The play bristles with terrible (true) stories of hideous violence and vicious cruelty. It’s hard to hear, but necessary, and Oforka reminds us that we live with the legacy of that system.In Patricia Logue’s nimble production (first seen at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre), the well-appointed dining room (precisely designed by Stella-Jane Odoemelam) becomes a pressure-cooker. Matthew Gravelle adroitly portrays three differing sorts of predatory men, while Nia Roberts plays Elisabeth as a cracked belle, a shrill, larger-than-life version of a period dramatic heroine. This mostly works well, though at the end, her callous disregard for Annie and Cerys might have more chilling power if delivered in a lower key. The stage belongs, however, to Suzanne Packer’s Annie, all bright, busy, desperate energy, and Shvorne Marks’s Cerys, still, watchful and raging. This is, rightly, their story.★★★★☆To April 12, stratfordeast.com
