Coleridge- Taylor of Freetown

Quaker Meeting House Venue 40 12/8/ 24

Tayo Aluko writer and performer

Mojisola Kareem director

Kristin Wong piano

I met Tayo Aluko outside the Queen‘s Hall last week, where he was giving out leaflets for this show after Elizabeth Llewellyn’s concert which included songs by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).  We chatted about the mixed-race British composer, whom I’d written about during lockdown, and he told me about Samuel’s nephew, George Coleridge-Taylor, the retired Sierra Leonean ambassador, the hero of his play. Samuel never knew his father, Daniel Taylor, a medical student who left London before his birth, and certainly didn’t meet his much younger half-brother, who adopted the name Coleridge-Taylor when he found out about his sibling’s fame. 

Tayo Aluko, a Nigerian lawyer who’s lived in Liverpool for many years, has built up a formidable reputation for writing and performing radical plays about aspects of Black History, especially ‘Call Mr Robeson’ his play about the great singer and activist.  Today’s play is set in 1999 during the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone.  Gunfire resounds as George rushes in to hide in his bedroom.  Soon he hears soldiers from the Rebel Forces in his house, and a terrified woman is brought in and raped next door.  In a series of flashbacks, he calms himself by recalling the tours he has made to Britain and America, promoting his uncle’s songs.  With fine accompaniment by Kristin Wong, these mainly gentle songs, some settings by African poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and others by English poets, provide a respite from the appalling threats and violence he, and we, can hear, but not see. Aluko, in these sections also takes on the characters of the abusers to chilling effect. The Civil War in Sierra Leone, with significant atrocities, was under-reported at the time and is now largely forgotten in the UK.   

It's an uncomfortable watch, and Aluko doesn’t hesitate to point out that George has shown misogynistic attitudes to the women in his own life, even as he struggles to find a way to help the assaulted woman to escape.  There are other flashbacks to the past, including George’s time as an ambassador to Nigeria during the Biafran war where he enabled his fellow countrymen and Biafrans to leave the country.  He sings an excerpt from ‘Hiawatha’s Departure’, cleverly repurposing Longfellow’s words about the desolation of the Native American tribal lands to fit this later war.

An audience of around 30 almost fills the Studio at the Quaker Meeting House, and are engrossed by the central narrative.  However as the play went on, I wondered if the fictional back story of George’s musical tours eventually made the play confusing.  I felt that those present didn’t find out as much about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his music as Aluko  hoped, despite his own lively singing, and Kristin Wong’s keyboard skills, splendidly exhibited in her playing of Coleridge-Taylor’s adaptation of the spiritual, ‘Motherless Child’ one of his Twenty-four Negro Songs.   I wasn’t able to stay for the Q and A, though many did, and I’m sure more knowledge was gained  and useful discussion took place.

Photo credit: Max Farrar