Elizabethan House re-enactment sessions

Our historic Elizabethan House became the location for a series of re-enactment sessions aimed at school children during October and November 2007.

Two re-enactors from the Mirror Mirror Playback Theatre took on the roles of merchant slave trader, Captain Hugh Crow, and abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson, bringing history alive for the attendees and engaging all 270 of them in an exciting exploration of the themes surrounding the transatlantic slave trade.

School groups who had booked into the sessions were able to watch and listen to the re-enactors and join in with some interactive elements. These included being marched through the house, sold at an auction and made to recreate the famous engraving of the Brookes ship, which showed hundreds of slaves packed into the hold and which was first published here in Plymouth.

The students were also able to ask questions about the events that surrounded the transatlantic slave trade and take part in a debate. The majority of them had been unaware of Plymouth’s involvement with the trade before seeing the performance, and left with a much better understanding of its scale, and the effect it had on Britain, the West Indies and the west coast of Africa.