The Saltmine Theatre Company’s Amazing Grace was advertised on the Fringe Festival website as an ‘historical/folk’ piece, telling the story of John Newton, a slave trader who, after a near shipwreck saw the error of his ways, became a cleric, abolitionist, and composer of the hymn that has, with the American Civil Rights movement, become indissolubly associated with an ongoing fight for freedom.
The play was billed as ‘a powerfully moving story of slavery, freedom and the remarkable power of love and grace to transform a life’ and so I thought I would be seeing an adaptation of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography for the stage. The playwright would have been well advised to lift text from Newton’s autobiography, An Authentic Narrative of some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of — (1764), or from his Thoughts on the African Slave Trade (1787), which, respectively, detail the remarkable life of the man and provide an unflinching account of the horrors of slavery. Instead, the audience was presented with a ham-fisted narration that reduced all the complexities of Newton’s life to a simple tale of redemption by conversion.
It was only when I read the programme – there was no mention of this in any of the advertising – that I realised the Saltmine Company is far more concerned with evangelising than with theatre. The producers earnestly hope ‘that John Newton’s life story and the impact of God’s grace will encourage and bless you’. I felt neither encouraged nor blessed, but insulted that I had been duped into seeing this play. Religious education through theatre is one thing, but what can only be regarded as the purposeful absence of this intention in any of the promotional material is insidious to say the least. Unless you take the step of researching the theatre company responsible for the play, which I think I am safe to say most festival-goers don’t, then you are in the uncomfortable situation of having missionaries come to your door. What’s worse is that they stay there for over two hours.
The entire focus of the play is on the personal fall and redemption of Newton. In asides to the audience, he narrates his own life, interrupting the play’s action to comment on his thinking as he gradually accepts Christ. These asides detract from the emotional intensity of the story. They feel heavy-handed and unnecessarily didactic, making the play more a Sunday school lesson than a genuine spiritual autobiography. Of course, none of this is helped by the portrayal of Newton as a cock-eyed Panglossian optimist, with an unnerving degree of enthusiasm of the kind associated with modern evangelism; he smiles throughout, even when discussing the subhuman conditions of the slave ships. Nor, for that matter, is the story aided by the steady stream of two-dimensional supporting players like his friend Jim, the Atheist, who slips too easily into the caricature of a devil-on-the-shoulder. There are some touching moments with his wife Polly but as with the rest of the play, the human elements are drowned out by their divine implications.
As Newton’s own life is distilled into this simple schema, so too is the wider abolitionist movement. It becomes a battle of Newton and Wilberforce contra mundum, between enlightened evangelical Christians and the heathen world. It completely glosses over the fact that support for slavery, like abolition, cut across religious divisions. There is a legitimate case to be made about the role dissenting protestants had in bringing about the end of the slave trade, but to frame the story entirely in these terms makes for bad history and stultifyingly boring theatre.
If there were one saving grace here, it would be the music: the hymn itself is rendered beautifully, as are the folk songs and the shanties of the sailors. Unfortunately, this is not enough to redeem what is a truly wretched piece of drama.
Amazing Grace was performed at Palmerston Place Church, Edinburgh from August 13 to August 16 2014, and will tour at venues across the country during September and October 2014.