Ghosts

“Celebrates the humanity of the enslaved”

Long ReviewsApr 23, 2021Glasgow/Smartphone app

Ghosts

Thom Dibdin

Thom has been a freelance critic, feature writer and reporter for The Stage since 1994 and is a former Scotland correspondent for the ...full bio

National Theatre of Scotland’s immersive, app-led performance explores the slavery on which Glasgow was built

While Scotland emerges from lockdown but before audiences can return to theatres, the National Theatre of Scotland is using an audio-visual app to stage Adura Onashile’s Ghosts as a self-guided immersive performance.

Ghosts takes place across the squares, streets and alleyways of Glasgow’s Merchant City. In nine short episodes it steps from the Ramshorn Graveyard down to the Clyde, via places named after the wealthy merchants whose money built them and the goods that created that wealth.

None are named for the trade that underpinned all their endeavours and seeped into the whole of Scottish society, however. There is no Slave Street – this is not the Slave Quarter.

Reuben Joseph as the Young Man recalls his life as a slave: conceived in Africa, born at sea, sold and brought to Glasgow. He talks of the past but connects with the here and now, chiding the audience gently from deep in the soil: “I laughed when your phones got cameras,” he says. “They won’t record the past.”

Joseph’s hypnotic, rhythmic delivery insinuates poetry into Onashile’s text. In each location – often houses built by slavers – it connects to those locations as it moves from his specific story to the general story of slavery, providing enough context without ever resorting to an information dump.

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Expensive Shit

Writer Adura Onashile. Photo: Eoin Carey

Lisa Livingstone provides another emphatic, convincing performance as the Mother. Lying cramped up the bottom of a slave ship, the sea swell moving the ship as she is about to give birth, she talks of the place you are standing – Virginia Court – and the trade on which it was built.

The immersive media elements of the piece are slight, providing some context but little additional creative flow. Floaty lights for ghosts can distract from the text as you look for something more significant. What is there is probably best experienced in the evening, as glorious sunlight dulls the visuals on a phone screen.

Sound designer and composer Niroshini Thambar’s input is rather more integral. As well as building atmosphere, she helps keep the pace between stops, while Simon Donaldson and Fiona MacNeil read newspaper notices of runaway slaves and slaves for sale.

As you near the Clyde, they become onlookers, enticing the lost runaway, entrapping them with false friendship, broadening the context to show that, what ever your heritage, your ancestors were likely touched by slavery.

Onashile speaks meaningfully to a white audience: not implicating, but asking us to acknowledge. She allows the audience to share her anger at the worst elements of the heritage that we have in common. While the streets are not named after the people who died that they might be built, she celebrates the humanity of the enslaved, giving their memory a name and a place on our map.