Musical Theatre Review said “Every so often there is a piece that touches the soul. It was developed, following funding from Arts Council England, and taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, where it received a host of fantastic reviews. Sold was first performed as a work-in-progress production at Oxford’s Offbeat Festival in 2018. She was compelled to show the historic truth using the real and published words of Mary Prince, an actual victim of the British Slave Trade.Įdmead’s production tells Mary’s story using a blend of storytelling, song, dance and drumming, alongside the West African tradition of the griot, a important role in the African community that straddles being a historian, storyteller, singer, poet and musician. I feel humbled to tell her story.”Įdmead, an actress and writer who has worked with companies including Talawa, Orange Tree Theatre and London Bubble, was inspired to create Sold after being encouraged to audition for a part in a production about slavery where none of the enslaved characters spoke about their experiences – the action and voices coming from the European characters and their perspectives. Her strength and resilience to stay alive through the horrors of British chattel slavery, to fall in love, work for her freedom and share her story to help bring slavery to an end, was a huge achievement for an enslaved West Indian woman in 1831. “Mary’s story is one of the unassuming heroine. Speaking about the story, Edmead, who both wrote and stars in the show, said:

Sold uses her words and experiences to explore the harsh realities of enslavement, travelling from her childhood days as a passive survivor to later in her life when she was trying to gain her freedom and change the system that kept her enslaved. Her story, originally published by the anti-slavery movement of the 1800s, was popular in its day, contributing enormously to the ending of slavery, but has long been forgotten and is rarely referenced or known.

Mary Prince was born into slavery in the British West Indies and worked tirelessly there before being taken in her last years to the UK. The Edinburgh Fringe hit, staged by Kuumba Nia Arts and Unlock the Chains Collective, runs at The Vaults from 28 January to 2 February 2020.

Telling the story of Mary Prince, a woman born into slavery in the British West Indies, Amantha Edmead’s award-winning Sold will play a one-week run in London as part of the VAULT Festival 2020.

The story of mary prince