Salt review – one-woman show retraces the transatlantic slave route

Tim Etchells of the experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment once wrote a superb essay on the risks that come when an artist is genuinely invested in what they are doing on stage – how it exposes them and how the audience recognises this and is laid bare, too.

Selina Thompson’s one-woman show, in which she draws upon her journey retracing the transatlantic slave triangle from Britain to Ghana to Jamaica and back, is theatre that does just that. And not just because she asks the first three rows of the audience to don safety goggles when she takes swings at pink salty rocks with a pickaxe.

This piece is about a personal journey that Thompson made but it is also about the journeys of millions of black men, women and children. They were sold in the slave trade on which the wealth of Europe was built, providing the foundations of its economic success today. On a cargo ship to Ghana, Thompson encounters contemporary racism: cruel, casual, completely normalised. At the former trading fort of Elmina castle, Ghana, she stands before the Gate of No Return that faces the Atlantic ocean.

Salt is a piece that is so haunted by absence – of the many who died in Elmina, during their voyages and on the plantations – that the traumas of the past become palpably present. How, asks Thompson, can this grief coexist in a world of post offices and perfume diffusers? This show is, as she says, her “act of remembrance and grief” but it is also our burden. Lest we forget, at the end she gives us all a small piece of rock. For the rest of the day, I feel its weight in my pocket, its rough edges a sharp reminder.

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The performance is delivered with the lightest of touches, as Thompson stands before us in a white dress and adopts an easy, conversational tone. As with Josette Bushell-Mingo’s extraordinary Nina, which is at the Traverse in Edinburgh, this is a piece suffused with anger at the fact that it even has to be asserted that black lives matter.

It also uses humour to fine effect, not least in the wry conversations that Thompson has with her father, a man inclined to treat his daughter’s stories with a pinch of salt. But then, this is a piece that offers the gift of seeing the world through different eyes.

• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.