The Yard confronts the Door Of No Return
Video: Samuel Takes A Break … In Male Dungeon No.5 After a Long But Generally Successful Day of Tours, The Yard website
Daniel Nelson
The ever-provocative Yard Theatre’s latest production was such an instant success that after a few performances its run was extended by a fortnight.
Those early audiences were right: Rhianna Ilube’s 90-minute play is hugely entertaining.
Unexpectedly entertaining, considering that it’s set in Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, with its dungeons and punishment cells and its Door Of No Return, through which thousands of captured people took their last steps in Africa before dragging their shackles onto slave ships.
It’s not what you would consider the basis for laugh-out-loud comedy.
But Ilube skilfully counterbalances this memorial to a shockingly inhumane, degrading, avaricious period of history with a contemporary personality clash between serious, stiff, uptight senior tour guide Samuel and bubbly ticket booth assistant Orange. She wants to move on and out, and to spark up Samuel’s somewhat stodgy presentation style. He is resistant, disturbed by the Castle’s historical resonances and irritated by the tourists and their phones, cameras and social media streams (“Today the tourists have been getting to me.”).
Ilube walks a fine line. Samuel Takes A Break … In Male Dungeon No.5 After a Long But Generally Successful Day of Tours is funny and sharp, yet respectful of the horrors of the place, even managing to both lampoon and harpoon the two-time Governor of the Committee of Merchants of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and his lover, Letitia: in a room in this benighted place they managed the Castle, slept, prayed, wrote letters, and under the floorboards “you can see the outlines of Male Dungeon No.5 [where]
”... he is conducting his affairs, the affairs of the state
and below his feet
are my people.”
Samuel Takes A Break … In Male Dungeon No.5 After a Long But Generally Successful Day of Tours is at the Yard Theatre, Unit 2A, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN, until 23 March. Info: https://www.theyardtheatre.co.uk/ Yard Theatre
28 February, Black Out Night, programmed for an all-Black audience to collectively engage with the show
Rhianna Ilube is a playwright and events curator from London. Her debut play, Samuel Takes A Break…, was Highly Commended for the Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate Award, and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. She has been a member of the Royal Court Intro Group, Royal Court x Sister Productions group, Oxford Playmakers and Omnibus Engine Room. She is now developing her first pilot with Expanded Media for a Sky Table Read and is a member of the House Productions ‘Residence’ Programme. Ilube has worked for interactive theatre-makers Coney for three years, and became a film programmer for British Film Institute ‘Flare’ in 2023.
Coming to The Yard: Multiple Casualty Incident, a show about people on one side of the world training to help people in crisis on the other side of the world. Roleplay, desire, and compassion will intertwine, showing the limits of help and the beginnings of harm. From 27 April