Guest Blog: Marcus Rediker and Naomi Wallace, Creators of THE RETURN OF BENJAMIN LAY, on Bringing His Amazing Story to the Stage

The Return of Benjamin Lay has its origins in protest. We were scheduled to give a plenary lecture at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin on the theme, "What Comes after Nations?". We decided to end our talk by having an actor dressed as Benjamin Lay - the fierce 18th century dwarf abolitionist who performed acts of guerilla theatre against enslavers - come onto the stage to disrupt the proceedings by challenging the audience about their complicity with inequality and oppression.

The conference curators liked the idea, so we wrote a ten-minute monologue for our actor. We asked the curators to help us find a dwarf actor. They grew anxious and sent us the acting reels of five actors, none of whom were little people. We insisted and found a little person actor on our own. At this point, the curators "withdrew their support" for that part of our lecture. After conferring with little people/disability rights activists we considered this to be an act of prejudice and censorship and we resigned from the conference in protest. Marcus then flew to North Yorkshire, where Naomi lives, and we started writing the play in earnest. This play was originally Banned in Berlin.

The basis of our collaboration is a book Marcus wrote entitled The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017). This was our archive, so to speak. We wanted to bring Benjamin back from the dead to speak to a world profoundly riven by inequality and damaged by environmental destruction.

One of the things that attracted us to the project was that Benjamin himself was so theatrical in his protests. He deliberately did outrageous things to "wake people up." He appeared at a big Quaker meeting to challenge Quaker slaveowners, who were numerous at the time. He pierced a bladder of red berry juice and spattered the enslavers with the "blood" of their victims to humiliate them in public. He was disowned for his action, but he never gave up his anti-slavery ministry among his fellow Quakers.

Our working process was to select moments from Benjamin Lay's life and re-imagine them as elements of the play. Lay met King George II and this became the basis of a dramatic encounter. Benjamin worked for years as a shepherd and loved sheep. Since Naomi lives in sheep country, we spent an afternoon talking to one of her neighbours about the nature of sheep to understand the human-animal relationship. Benjamin was one of the first animal rights activists, so we developed this theme in various ways.

We had to educate ourselves about the insects Benjamin would have encountered in Pennsylvania. Benjamin worked for a dozen years as a sailor so we had to figure out how a person only four feet tall could possible do the hard physical work of a tall ship. He was deeply religious, using the Bible to support his arguments against slavery. We had to study his prophetic way of speaking based on the Book of Revelation. Benjamin was a defender of the environment far ahead of his time: he said, beware "rich men who poison the earth for gain." We had to evoke his consistently challenging, deeply radical worldview.

Over the next five years we wrote and rewrote the play, meeting when we could, communicating across the Atlantic by every means available to us: Zoom, phone, email, text. We held readings of the play in London, Paris, and New York, returning to the manuscript each time to make revisions and refinements.

From the very beginning of the project, we felt that world needed Benjamin Lay now more than ever. We have summoned him from the grave to give us the benefit of his hard-won wisdom.

The Return of Benjamin Lay is at Finborough Theatre from 13 June - 8 July

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