Radio review: Lights Up - The Meaning of Zong

Another BBC Lights Up instalment to make it to radio rather than TV, actor Giles Terera's playwrighting debut has an epic scope and emotional intimacy that would, between them, have made trying to film it using social distancing difficult. Helped by Jon Nicholls' sound design, The Meaning of Zong finds a natural home as an audio drama that can conjure up some of the bleakest crimes of British history along with triumphs (am I saying that radio is closer to theatre than film or TV are in how much of the work the audience's imagination has to do? Maybe I am.) It's a topical story, especially given that Tom Morris' production was commissioned for Bristol Old Vic, a city at the centre of the ongoing argument about Imperial Britain's racist and oppressive heart, and the loud voices that insist any attempt to reveal the truth about history is the same as erasing it. This is alluded to in a present-day framing device in which Rachel (Moronke Akinola) has an argument with a bookshop manager over a book about the slave trade being displayed in the African, rather than British, history section.

She's looking into the 1781 Zong massacre, in which over 130 men, women and children were thrown over the side of a slave ship over several nights after it ran into trouble. Terera plays free black man Olaudah Equiano aka Gustavas Vassa (he's almost suppressed the memory of his original African name along with the painful memories that go with it,) who discovers the story of Zong and takes it to the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp (Samuel West.) Along with activist Ottobah Coguano (Michael Balogun) they attempt to bring the details of a court case about Zong to a wider audience, in the hope that the horrific details being publicly known will galvanise support for their cause among the people.

The Meaning of Zong is in a way doing the same thing, reminding us of a part of history that's out there for anyone to find, but which is unlikely to be taught in many history classes. There are, of course, harrowing moments as we flash back to the slave ship, but as mentioned in his introduction to the play Terera is very interested in the power of story here: In the newspaper report on the original court case, Equiano is struck by the word "shudder" describing the courtroom's response to what happened to the slaves, and that's what leads him to try and get the story to as much of the country as possible (Akiya Henry's Miss Greenwood is only hired to take down what's said in court but ends up being a microcosm of what they hope the story will do to the nation, at first not wanting to hear any more but eventually being spurred into anger and action.)

What's also fascinating is that this is one of those moments in history where the biggest and most important change can be started by the most pedestrian of things: Far from being acknowledged as murder, the court case is actually an insurance dispute, because while the insurance company did include a clause that covered the value of "cargo" thrown overboard in an emergency, there's disagreement over whether the situation was as dire as it's being made out. It's the banality of the situation that makes everyone there so casually give details of the massacre, which when transplanted to newspaper reports people read in their own homes reveal it as the human horror that it was.

There are knowing moments about how little has changed in some areas (Equiano gets racially profiled by an officer when investigating at the docks,) but this isn't some finger-wagging exercise. Rather it seems like a model for how telling the truth about history doesn't have to mean either whitewashing the past or condemning it: Instead of leaving up statues of slavers and hushing up the truth about them, how about doing what the play does, and acknowledging the horrors, but celebrating the people like Equiano, Coguano and Sharp who fought to consign them to the past? A very well-made debut play from Terera, and although it works very well in this medium it feels like it could lend itself to some interesting, dynamic staging if it does end up back on the stages it was written for.

The Meaning of Zong by Giles Terera is available until March 2022 on BBC Sounds.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

Image credit: BBC.