The young-blooded, hot-blooded Surrey-based company BurntOut is on tour with their promising, award winning play about the Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Barbados – Muscovado.

Muscovado – as described in the play – is the partially refined sugar of the sugar cane, edible but not quite how we want it. A perfect analogy for a piece which, even eighteen months in the making, is still very much finding it’s feet.

The play opens with an explosive choral number from the vocally talented company – setting the tone of the beautiful soundtrack (original music by James Reynolds) which underscores the entire piece. We then break quickly into the first scene of the two-hour play. Mrs. Fairbranch sits in her ebony home – a mini London in the heart of Barbados – drinking tea whilst her house-slave Willa fans her.

We quickly learn that, in return for her affections, Willa acts as a rat for her employer. The weather is bad in Barbados. There are ill-winds, a promise of a storm. And Mrs. Fairbranch senses a growing rebellion amongst the slaves of her husband’s plantation; a rebellion which never quite comes into fruition, as the action of the play drags from one vignette to another.

The politics of the piece are promising – the sense of an uprising of the slaves, the battle for power between the Captain, his wife and Parson Lucy, but these promises are never delivered with any dramatic realisation. Countless were the times a character would enter a room to announce that they had just overheard the previous secret conversation, a dramatic tool which does nothing to abet the drama, but only slowly diminishes it throughout. We never really get to see the power struggles or games played out. We only ever get a whiff of excitement.

Every member of the cast appears to have been given a singular direction – which they rarely waver from. Fairbrach (Clemmie Reynolds) is uptight, slightly manic. Alexander Kiffin as Asa – our story’s hero – is stoic and brooding throughout. And Parson Lucy (Adam Morris) is snivelling, hateful and awkward. These characters do not vary, they do not develop. The singular exception is Sophia Mackay playing Willa; only twelve-years-old, she is a convincingly innocent girl, a ray of sunshine who is beaten, broken and cruelly stripped of her childhood by a merciless system.

Sometimes the writing is beautiful, filled with colourful analogy and poetry. The language of Asa, Elsie and Willa expresses all of their longings, their small tastes of freedom. But they are not presented with quite the same psychological complexity of their white counterparts – the pastor, or Mrs. Fairbranch.

Fairbranch – and the breakdown she undergoes with all the subtlety of a bull – drives most of the story along. She is manipulated by the Pastor into devising the dangerous idea of people-breeding, though we never get to see this scene. As a matter of fact, many of the more interesting scenes of the play don’t happen on-stage. What we’re left with is a series of clunky vignettes – the characters practising posing for a portrait, for example, which is as dramatically fruitless as it sounds.

The main reason for this seems to be the definite absence on-stage of a key character – Captain Fairbranch. Everybody discusses the Captain, and everybody is bound to him. But he never materialises. A dramatic decision which fails to pack any punch, chiefly because – unlike the absent patriarchs of Miss Julie, in The Three Sisters, or Hedda Gabler – the Captain is not held in any reverence, and we immediately know what every character thinks of him. Mrs. Fairbranch, for example, despises him, and spells this out for us on numerous occasions.

In fact, everything is spelt out for the audience. There is very little in the way of movement or play. Even the tropical ‘sweat’ that the company have been plastered with pre-show is not earned. I do not believe any one of them broke any real sweat. The cast of six trip clunkily over one another in the small space as they stumble from one scene to the next, strung together only by the occasional beauty of Matilda Ibini’s writing and their own musical talents.   ★★★☆☆   Chris White   15/04/15