Leeds Playhouse – Tuesday 2nd October 2018
Reviewed By Dawn Smallwood
5*****
As part of the 2018 Furnace Festival, an annual celebration which proudly showcases new theatre from up and coming artists to well established ones, Selina Thompson brings Salt her solo show to the Leeds Playhouse’s Pop-Up Theatre. The show could not be any more appropriate with the commencement of Black History Month.
Salt is about a journey that two artists take via a cargo ship from Europe to Ghana then indirectly to Jamaica and back home via the United States on another ship. This is where they retrace a former route of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle. The audience are invited to join Thompson on this journey in search for answers to their questions and the reminiscing of their memories. She poignantly shares the pain and grief that their past ancestors suffered and yet not forgetting how far their generations have gone to get where they are today. Strongly shared is the harsh reality of dispersion that imperialism, colonialism and capitalism have brought and the deep routed ignorance that triggered racism and marginalisation.
The dialogue is poetically rich and a figurative journey is explicably shared by descending deep down to the bottom of the Atlantic and slowly though painfully ascending to the top of the ocean. Salt is physically present on stage and the breaking of it is used to powerfully illustrate the truthful journey that both she and the other artist experienced and the indirect abuse they endured. An illuminated triangle rises above the stage reminds the audience poignantly the horrors of the slave trade and slavery (past and present). There is good use of a visual screening which is projected in defining and explaining what home and identity really are.
Thompson delivers a short but very powerful and moving account of Salt and how much one has to travel so far back to travel forward. The journey does not stop there and it resonates with one’s life journey with a particular focus on identity in somewhat an ignorant world. It is an unmissable play that requires full attention from beginning to end and emphasis is on not forgetting the past. Their physical journey across the Atlantic may have finished but like everyone their journeys continue figuratively as emphasised at the end. Salt is a flavourer for many things and with the kind offering from the artist afterwards, big thanks from many are personally shared for Salt.