The Spectre of the Slave Ship: Caryl Phillips’s Adaptation for the Stage of Rough Crossings by Simon Schama

The representation onstage of traumatic historical events is met with various challenges: for example, the conventions of dramaturgy may humanize the perpetrators of wide-scale criminal acts through the requirement for complex characterization; there is a risk of misrepresentation when the fictional content diverges from reality. There is also the problem of archival silence around those who were the victims of atrocities such as the slave trade. Caryl Phillips's adaptation of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings demonstrates the way in which dramaturgical strategies can be deployed to confront some of these challenges by rejecting the concept of authenticity altogether. His play also shows how this dramaturgical intervention can offset the limitations of the archive in order to retrieve the lost voices of the enslaved

Review article on conceptions of creative writing

Gregory Light’s article touches upon some of the problems of learning and teaching creative writing as an academic discipline. It highlights the distinction between deeper learning and surface reproduction of knowledge as it relates to creative writing studies. This has interesting implications, as there is a tendency, with creative writing studies, to focus on the finished product (the texts produced by students) rather than on the learning process and the relationship between the two. Light’s study is useful for helping me to formulate teaching strategies that bridge that divide

Tituba

Monodrama that focuses on the story of the enslaved woman whose confession of witchcraft drove the Salem witch trials of 169

Something borrowed

Short play, part of "The Morning After" series which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 30th Aug 2004 and 03 Sept 2004

Indiana

Dramatisation of the novel by George Sand

Clean trade

A 45 minute radio play about a group of nightworking office cleaners who start trading at the bank they are working for