Phillis in London tells her incredible and poignant story. Based on her visit, it re-imagines and dramatises her experience as an African-American/British-American woman writer abroad, in Europe’s greatest capital city, at the height of the slave trade, on the cusp of the American Revolution. It unveils the hidden world of African-Caribbean Georgian Londoners living alongside white Georgians who teamed together as ‘her friends’ whose support helped her fight for freedom.
Prodigy, poet and enslaved woman writer, Phillis set sail three times in her life. How did her ‘out-of-Africa’ and ‘out-of-America’ experiences transform her?
An excerpt from an original new play, written and directed by Ade Solanke
The film is an extract from the forthcoming play, in partnership with the ORNC. It’s a site-specific extract set in The Painted Hall, one of the places Phillis visited during her trip.