When the BBC programmed Rockets and Blue Lights as part of its Lockdown theatre festival, it had good cause to think it was on to a winner. Here was a play, pulled after three previews because of the Covid-19 pandemic, written by Winsome Pinnock, the first black woman to have a play staged at the National Theatre, directed by Miranda Cromwell and produced by the Manchester Royal Exchange. It had form.
What the BBC had no way of knowing was that its broadcast this weekend on Radio 3 would come at the end of almost three weeks of protests, statue-toppling and soul searching triggered by the killing of George Floyd. It is impossible to imagine a more timely contribution to the Black Lives Matter campaign.
Pinnock who, in her own words, is “descended from enslaved people”, takes as her starting point Slave Ship by JMW Turner. First seen in 1840, it is an astonishing image of a broiling sea beneath swirling orange clouds, the sun casting a golden glow over the turbulence. In the watery distance a spindly ship rises at a precarious angle, while human hands emerge almost imperceptibly from the depths.
Turner’s original title was Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On. “Why does he make something so ugly beautiful?” asks one of Pinnock’s characters.
The play takes a similarly swirling journey through the light and shade of black history. Central is Kiza Deen’s Lou, a TV actor famed for futuristic voyages as the star of a US sci-fi series. She’s been cast in a movie about Turner to celebrate the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, but she discovers that the producers care more for the white abolitionists than the black slaves. She is being written out of her own story. She calls it “torture porn”.
Like the protesters who threw the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour, Pinnock sees the past sitting side by side with the present, forever needling, provoking, agitating – as restless and as uncontainable as a Turner seascape.
• Rockets and Blue Lights is available on BBC Radio 3.
