Freedom and Revolution : engaging creatively with Portchester's French prisoners of war and Revolution in the Caribbean

This follow-on proposal will provide significant additional impact by empowering young people to engage directly and creatively with research developed during the AHRC-funded "French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era" project (2013-2017). In performing a new play about the Caribbean Revolutionaries held at Portchester Castle in 1796, members of the National Youth Theatre and local Hampshire community groups will bring that research to both a live audience and a global virtual one. A recording of the production will be the centrepiece of a range of educational resources to help English Heritage tell a forgotten part of Black History. The original research showed how important theatre was in shaping debates about nationhood and political legitimacy during the First Empire and how prisoner-of-war theatre fostered cultural exchange, themes that will be echoed in the new play.

In 1807, French prisoners of war on board the prison hulk The Crown, moored in Portsmouth Harbour, opened a Theatre of Emulation (the name comes from one of the popular Boulevard theatres in Paris) and premiered a 4-act historical drama, The Revolutionary philanthropist or Hecatomb on Haiti, which tackled the incendiary topic of the Haitian Revolution. A manuscript of the play survives and it shares a number of themes with the only other known surviving French prisoner-of-war play manuscript of the period, Roseliska, which premiered at Portchester Castle in 1810. Ideas of freedom, imprisonment, resistance, patriotism and loyalty suffuse both texts but, unlike Roseliska, the Revolutionary Philanthropist is unperformable in a 21st-century context because it reproduces 18th-century notions of racial difference that are wholly unacceptable today.

In 2019, sound artist Elaine Mitchener subverted the intention of the anonymous author of the Revolutionary Philanthropist to highlight Black agency in the struggle for emancipation by using extracts from it in a Warwick-commissioned sound installation, 'Les Murs sont témoins /These Walls Bear Witness' at Portchester Castle. This has revealed the potential for working creatively with the play as a means of exploring the Revolution in the Caribbean and Portchester's role in global history: over 2000 Black revolutionaries from St Lucia, St Vincent, Guadeloupe and Haiti, including women and children, were captured by the British in 1796 and sent to Portchester. Their lives mirror those of the on-stage rebels in the Revolutionary Philanthropist.

Heritage Lottery Funding has already paid for me to work with a director, Mumba Dodwell and a playwright, Lakesha Arie-Angelo since July 2020, and for 2 weeks of R&D [research and development] workshops under English Heritage's flagship youth engagement programme Shout Out Loud. Two powerful work-in-progress performances have been transformational for those involved. The NLHF money was never going to be enough to cover a full production and it is clear that the legacy of the project will now fall short of its full potential unless the new play is performed on site at Portchester to engage meaningfully with decolonising Portchester's history as a prison-of-war depot. Follow-on funding would enable us to continue to work with playwright and director and record the production to use as the focal point of a range of educational resources. A live streaming of the play will be broadcast simultaneously on the EH and NYT YouTube channels, which between them have 1.3 million subscribers. The new play, written in conjunction with young Black actors from NYT, explores fundamental questions about human rights, discrimination, identity and power. It moves beyond traditional narratives of the enslaved as victims and celebrates the role of women in Revolution. Bringing it to production would allow us to reach new audiences, especially in the Caribbean, significantly enhance the value and wider benefits of the original research project and enable young people to take ownership of history.