“Europe has erased the Haitian revolution from the historical past books,” says one of many actors in Emily Aboud’s broadside for Lagahoo Productions, a full of life patchwork of a play that claims to not be about slavery, however type of is. The playwright contends that Haiti, having turn into the primary black republic in 1804, has been conveniently forgotten about by the slave-trading nations.
Britain, for instance, took one other 40 years to part out the commerce in human beings, whereas France was accepting reparations from Haiti as just lately as 1947 – the nation paid the equal of £17.4bn in in the present day’s cash for its personal freedom.
Loads of causes for the west to deal with the Caribbean nation as a responsible secret and loads of causes, Aboud suggests, to attribute supernatural powers to its residents. Can or not it's merely coincidence, the play asks, that the primary nation to abolish slavery is the one its former colonisers most carefully affiliate with the darkish arts? May the concern of magical effigies actually be a concern of repressed guilt, the reality lurking within the darkness that threatens to leap out and expose the perpetrators?
That the faith of Vodou (as distinct from Voodoo) is a religious perception system targeted on love – and never issues that go bump within the night time – is an irony that tells you extra in regards to the oppressors than the oppressed. It was with a Vodou ceremony in 1791 that the revolution started.
All that is fascinating, enraging stuff – as is the query of the place the ache goes after a criminal offense of this scale. This isn't a distant piece of historical past, however one thing seen throughout us within the cities constructed on the again of the slave commerce. Aboud suggests we're nonetheless frightened of the implications.
Whether or not this provides as much as a coherent play is one other matter. Bogeyman is constructed on a satisfying number of varieties, the 4 actors switching deftly from dance to direct handle, storytelling and dramatic sketches. The scenes, although, are inconsistent. Some seem like workshop workouts, others are inconsequential home exchanges, whereas the actual polemical power is reserved for the factual data which, for all its political weight, seems like uncooked materials in the hunt for a play.
At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, till 29 August.
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