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.