Incidents in the Life of an Anglican Slave
Written and performed by London-based writer and researcher, Desirée Baptiste, this new play comes to Jesus College, following previous performances at Lambeth Palace Library, the Edinburgh Fringe, All Souls, Oxford and other venues in the UK and overseas, including at the Walcott Warner Theatre in Barbados.
Inspired by a letter written in 1723 by an anonymous enslaved Virginian to the archbishop of London, that asks to be released from slavery’s ‘cruell bondegg’, Baptiste describes Incidents (2023) as both a 'fictional slave narrative and ghost story' that 'explores, among other themes: slave literacy, slave laws, resistance, and religion'. The writer adds the play 'is also a tribute, by way of its attempt to restore personhood to, not only the author of the earliest known written plea for freedom by an enslaved person within the British Empire but the bi-racial plaintiff’s African mother, who stands in for a collective: the silent millions whose humanity was confiscated during the transatlantic slavery era and who left few individual traces in the archives.'
