REVIEW: The Return of Benjamin Lay at Finborough Theatre 13 June – 8 July 2023

‘A gentle play, performed with great warmth and sympathy by Mr. Povinelli, but it makes well-founded criticism, and it resonates strongly.’ ★★★★



Simple. Beautiful. Profound. The Finborough Theatre has dressed itself as a Quaker meeting-house for its production of The Return of Benjamin Lay. It has removed the boards over the windows, built the playing area into the bay, and allowed the evening sunset to frame Mark Povinelli’s delicate, nuanced playing of Benjamin. It is very simple but stunningly effective, and it speaks eloquently of the look and feel of Friends Meeting Houses. There is artful additional stage-light and sound design, but the big impression is natural, simple. Beautiful.

Benjamin Lay has been thrown out of the Quaker fellowship, and he has come back to beg us, the Finborough audience standing in for a Meeting, to let him back. Mark Povinelli’s use of audience response is integral to the play, though a less notably sympathetic and co-operative audience might give him problems. He moves around the stage with great authority, narrates with energy, keeps the seventy-minute-long monologue running like a train, and he tells a good story into the bargain.

Benjamin’s disagreement with the Quakers was built, it seems, on the complicity of Quakers with slavery; on Barbados sugar plantations, in William Penn’s sanctuary of religious toleration Pennsylvania, Quakers bought and owned human beings. There is some suggestion that Benjamin Lay’s sympathy for oppressed people came in part from his stature (Mark Povinelli self-identifies as a ‘little person’, and his stature is a feature of the stage picture and of his representation of Benjamin) but it did not affect his dynamism, or indeed his work as a sailor on sailing ships. What the play does supremely well is to ask the question of us – how much exploitation will we tolerate for cheap clothing, cheap food? The exploitation of far-away peoples was a bit less guilt-laden in the eighteenth century than it is now, but we all happily buy technology manufactured in China, run on batteries full of toxic chemicals mined in the Congo, often by children. Without operating a major guilt-trip on the audience, Benjamin’s gentle sermon reminds us that the cycle of exploitation didn’t end with the abolition of slavery. This is a gentle play, performed with great warmth and sympathy by Mr. Povinelli, but it makes well-founded criticism, and it resonates strongly.

Photos by Robert Boulton

The Return of Benjamin Lay by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker at Finborough Theatre, Wednesday 13 June – 8 July 2023

Box office: https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-return-of-benjamin-lay/

Cast

MARK POVINELLI

Director

RON DANIELS

Set Designer

RICCARDO HERNANDEZ ISOBEL NICOLSON

Costume Designer

ISOBEL NICOLSON

Lighting Design

ANTHONY DORAN

Sound Design

JOHN LEONARD

Movement Consultant

BILL IRWIN

Assistant Director

MARTHA J. BALDWIN

Producer

Presented by Arsalan Sattari Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre.

Reviewed by Chris Lilly