Rockets and Blue Lights review, Dorfman Theatre: An ambitious, humane examination of the unresolved history of the slave trade

There is no naive belief here that the past can be dredged up like a ‘find’ from the bottom of the ocean. Instead, Winsome Pinnock’s play maintains that the chief value of art lies in its capacity to bear witness

Luke Wilson and Kiza Deen in ‘Rockets and Blue Lights’ at the National Theatre (Brinkhoff-Moegenburg)

Flying back home from a creative writing residency in Seattle some years ago, the distinguished London-born playwright Winsome Pinnock made a detour and stopped off in Boston. Her objective was to see Slave Ship (1840), the oil painting by JMW Turner that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts there.

It must have felt like a date with destiny. The picture had long haunted Pinnock’s imaginative life. It depicts what – at first blush – looks like one of Turner’s trademark monumental maritime sunsets (like his much-reproduced The Fighting Temeraire). But peering at the actual pigment for a sustained period of time brought home to Pinnock the horrifying nature of its subject matter. The eye starts to notice the hands of drowning figures desperately reaching out of the waves. For art historians and connoisseurs, it is an open secret that the painting may be depicting the 1781 Zong Massacre, the real-life atrocity in which the crew of that ship threw the human captives overboard to a turbulent watery fate when rations ran low.

The painting forms the matrix of Rockets and Blue Lights, Pinnock’s inspirationally ambitious and all-encompassingly humane examination of the unresolved history of the transatlantic slave trade. It is brought to life in the Dorfman in a production of huge resourcefulness and chutzpah by Miranda Cromwell.