Freedom and Revolution: The Ancestors

In a collaboration between English Heritage, the National Youth Theatre and Kate Astbury's research team, with funding from the AHRC and the Lottery Heritage Fund, we began a project in 2020 called Freedom and Revolution. We took a French prisoner-of-war play from 1807 about the Revolution on Haiti, Le Philanthrope révolutionnaire, and created a new play out of it - the Ancestors, by Lakesha Arie-Angelo - that subverted the original play and wove into it strands about the real-life Black revolutionaries brought to Portchester.

The Research & Development phase in 2020 is explored on the English Heritage Shout out Loud pages here and led to a series of monologues on Google arts and culture, which can be seen here.

The R&D phase led to a new play that re-thinks race and gender in the French Revolution, The Ancestors, written by Lakesha Arie-Angelo and directed by Jade Lewis. It was rehearsed, staged and filmed at the Castle in August 2021 with a cast of young performers aged 18-25 from National Youth Theatre’s network of creative young people. The Warwick contribution to the project was funded with support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The partners explored how their partnership could be a model for creative collaboration and how combining research and co-creation can be empowering for young Black people. English Heritage's Director of Interpretation co-wrote an article with Kate Astbury on the broader possibilities of telling under-told narratives and difficult histories in innovative ways through creative dialogue between research and theatrical practice. See

‘Freedom and Revolution: creative responses to archival research’, Katherine Astbury and Dominique Bouchard Book-BEST-PRACTICE-11-2023-336Mo.pdf (icom.museum), pp. 128-38.

A trailer of the filmed performance in August 2021 on site at Portchester can be seen here

And there is more about the production on Google arts and cultures here