In the centre of the stage is a box: 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 2.5 feet deep. It’s just a regular box, we’re told. But this is a magic show: and we know whatever happens in that box will be anything but ordinary.
Henry ‘Box’ Brown, who famously escaped enslavement by mailing himself to freedom, is our magician and our storyteller. For those already familiar with Brown’s life, the significance of the box is writ large. Created by Rickerby Hinds, Blackbox sidesteps the usual trademarks of hip-hop theatre the playwright is known for; there’s no rap or beatboxing here, but fervent, direct address to the audience through spoken word remains. Drawing directly from Brown’s memoir, the play’s 19th Century syntax is fluidly delivered by actors Josiah Alpher and Jada Evelyn Ramsey. The latter is impressively chameleonic, voicing various figures in Brown’s life: his mother, cruel overseers, his wife.
The language is moving: hope for freedom is “a melting power dissolving [the enslaved’s] chains”. Yet the play’s structure craves similar elegance. Save a few well-crafted moments – such as a predictable but rewarding ending – the two elements of magic and theatre don’t integrate as powerfully as you’d wish. Weighed down by a largely chronological narrative in telling Brown’s story, the thrilling climax of the play – where the actors vividly render his miraculous, near-death journey in the box to freedom – is rushed. It’s a missed opportunity to linger with the significance of the box: the real life magic of Brown’s escape from, and through, captivity.
While one wishes this was braided more deeply into each moment of the play, Blackbox‘s premise is nevertheless compelling: that the awed question, how did they do it? applies not just to magic, but to the resilience and creativity of generations of Black people finding ways to break their chains.
Blackbox, Underbelly Cowgate, until 30 August (not 17), 12.40pm