Weaving together the many lives affected by these events across the globe, Giles Terera’s boldly inventive debut play The Meaning of Zong is a timely response to the social upheaval the world has witnessed in recent years.
Performed by an ensemble cast and punctuated with stirring music, it celebrates the power of individual action to drive huge societal change.
Two hundred years ago, Olaudah Equiano changed the world. Reading reports of a massacre aboard the slave ship Zong, where 132 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard, he joins forces with anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp to publicly condemn these abhorrent actions, setting in motion events which would go on to galvanise the abolition movement in the UK.
But Olaudah’s impassioned fight for justice goes beyond the courtroom. Having bought his own freedom, he now faces a personal battle to rediscover his past and accept his true self.