PB: Very much. We had a talk-back session after the show last night and a whole group of young people stayed and said they had been really gripped. They enjoyed the style of the production, I think, and were really beheld by the story because the story is a really moving and compelling one.
CT: How do you feel about hitting London's West End next week?
PB: We are obviously apprehensive a little bit in terms of the implications of that but in another way we are really excited because it is the perfect theatre for the show in the sense that it is situated in Whitehall so one way out of the theatre doors you look and there is Big Ben, which is all to do with the parliamentary side of the abolition itself, and when you look the other way you see Nelson's Column, which is in a whole square devoted to the year 1805 - the same period as the slave trade's abolition in1807.
CT: What was the motive behind running African Snow at this particular point in time?
We didn't want to be responsible for some kind of historical piece that would just commemorate the past but produce a play that would have real relevance and challenge the extent to which slavery is still a huge and dreadful problem in the world today in all kinds of new and modern disguises. So although we are not talking about people being shipped around the oceans in chains we are aware of the slaveries that goes on in economic terms, in terms of trade, sex trafficking and all those kinds of ghastly things all around the world.
We have been working with Christian organisations like Church Mission Society who helped us commission the play and whose founders include John Newton and William Wilberforce. These are organisations that are currently working against slavery and they are running campaigns in various parts of the globe, so that has been really good to feel that this is a challenge that is relevant now and that we are not only looking back but absolutely trying to catch a moment of significance in our national life when people can think deeply about slavery and what enslaves people and how one society, almost in ignorance, can enslave another.
CT: The play brings together John Newton and Olaudah Equiano in an imaginary meeting. Why did you feel it was necessary to bring these two historical figures together in the play in that way?
PB: We do know that because Olaudah Equiano and John Newton and Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect and other people were very involved together in the campaign, it is almost impossible to believe that these people didn't actually meet. Although there are no minutes from a meeting that we can point to to say they were in the same room together the likelihood is that they did meet. And both Equiano and Newton were called upon by Wilberforce to testify before Parliament in that campaign that took so long. It is a powerful and potent image for the whole thing because obviously the whole issue of slavery then and now is vast. As a writer, as creative people, you are looking for that human story that encapsulates the heart of it and I think we found that in the stories of these two men there was absolutely a representative white man and a representative black man who carried the heart of the problem of the play, which is: can they ever really sit down at the same table? Can they ever really be reconciled? Can there ever really be forgiveness? What kind of meeting in every level needs to take place before people are really able to be one? And it is more challenging because they are Christian so they have to meet.
It does ask very big questions of how we move away or move on from the legacy of these things which we still see in our society. There are still mistrustful attitudes between people of different races and different churches and it is core to the whole play.
The gap between them is a bit like the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel. What stories are there? What passes between them when finally Wilberforce brings them together? What chemistry is there between the hands of the white man and the black if they really are able to be reconciled and forgiven and move on together? And the play leaves that as partly an open question.
