Politics over production is not a fair trade

SLAVE, Lowry Quays, Salford
AT the end of “Slave”, the true story of former slave Mende Nazer, Feelgood Productions’ artistic director Caroline Clegg spends rather too much time — at least on opening night — thanking a long list of people and organisations.

Likewise, the programme is littered with the logos of companies and charities keen to be associated with its anti-slavery subject.

This sort of thing worries me a little. Does the play not stand on its own? Do these organisations really demand a public namecheck in return for doing the decent thing?

To fill in: Mende Nazer is a still-young woman who, at 12, was stolen from her home in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, beaten and sold into slavery. Seven years later she was given to her owner’s relative in London, where in 2000 she managed to escape, with the help of Sudanese strangers she met by chance.

There followed Sudanese government denial of the slave trade, incompetent British government refusal to grant asylum and a successful international campaign to make them change their mind.

And yes, Nazer was in the audience when Clegg and Kevin Fegan’s adaptation of her subsequent autobiography finally arrived on stage.

So go for the politics of the piece if you must: support for Nazer is obligatory for any half-decent human being. But how does it fare as a play?

Truth is, it is almost impossible to convey the daily terror of Nazer’s prison-like isolation from the world outside, but I wish the play had tried harder to do so. In a long first act, too much time is spent setting the scene of early, happy family life in the mountains before moving on to the unspeakable inhumanities of men and women towards children.

That despicable, worthless people exist is hardly news, and the play ends up as a simple linear story of Mende’s growth to adulthood in slavery where I would have preferred to know more about the broader issues.

These might not be in her book, but in six years of work you might think the company could have widened the overall story beyond just adding a bit of music and singing.