The Women of Llanrumney: A deft exploration of the brutalising impact of slavery

Telegraph

26-03-2025

'Freedom can't be written on no piece of paper,' Cerys tells her mother Annie – an enslaved housemaid on the Llanrumney sugar cane plantation in 1760s Jamaica. 'Real freedom is fought for through revolution and war.' With this exchange, Azuka Oforka's cracking debut both deftly exposes the contingent nature of freedom and throws down a gauntlet to the received wisdom that slavery was ended exclusively by the abolitionist movement and not, to some degree, by the many uprisings of the slaves themselves.
Oforka's drama, first seen at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre last year, could have been a worthy historical jeremiad. Instead, it ostensibly presents itself as a pleasingly old-fashioned drawing-room comedy. Inspired by the little-storied history of Welsh slave owners in 18th century Jamaica, it takes place in the plush parlour into which Elisabeth, sole heiress to the real life Llanrumney plantation, staggers into breakfast each morning appallingly hungover, brassy hair akimbo and lipstick too crimson, like a cross between Miss Hannigan and Blackadder's Elizabeth I.
Elisabeth, played with fabulous gusto by Nia Roberts, likes to regale her loyal and longserving housemaid Annie in almost sisterly fashion with scurrilous tales of the drunken and debauched night before, before retiring for a quick snooze before 'second breakfast' ('food is how these planters flex their wealth', says Annie to Cerys). Yet, like Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, she is blind to her impending doom: the crops are failing, her debts are skyrocketing and, beyond the elegant French veranda, revolution is brewing in the fields.
Oforka cleverly shows the brutalising fault lines of slavery, from Annie's earlier rejection at birth of her darker-skinned daughter in order to safeguard the undeniably freer life she enjoys as a housekeeper, to the ugly revenge executed against Elisabeth by one of her former slaves. Cerys, newly brought in from the fields to be trained up as a maid, and who looks in vain to her mother for a sign of maternal affection, acts as a sort of chorus, speaking truth to power and able to intuit changes in the air that the much more insulated Annie and Elisabeth cannot.
Both Annie and Cerys are played with impeccable nuance by Suzanne Packer and Shvorne Marks respectively in a play that is consistently alert to the shifting dynamics of power between women and which also boldly maintains a tiny sliver of sympathy for the monstrous and ultimately pitiless Elisabeth – a rare independent-minded woman in colonialism's cut-throat male playground.
Patricia Logue's light-footed production rarely missteps either, dancing the tightrope between queasy farce – embodied further by three pompous, perfumed plantation owning grotesques inhabited with fruity relish by Matthew Gravelle – and the still-shocking reality of slavery. This latter is all the more powerful for being mostly described rather than enacted, with a particularly appalling story told by Annie to her daughter that sheds some light on Annie's determined self preservation.
Perhaps the play is a little too long, and perhaps too it contains a needless final exchange between Annie and Elisabeth – the brute truth of their relationship is, after all, all too apparent. It's a tremendous first play, though, poised and assured, and fully deserving of its London transfer.