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In a collaboration between English Heritage, the National Youth Theatre and Kate Astbury's research team, with funding from the AHRC and the Lottery Heritage Fund, we began a project in 2020 called Freedom and Revolution. We took a French prisoner-of-war play from 1807 about the Revolution on Haiti, Le Philanthrope révolutionnaire, and created a new play out of it - the Ancestors, by Lakesha Arie-Angelo - that subverted the original play and wove into it strands about the real-life Black revolutionaries brought to Portchester.

The Research & Development phase in 2020 is explored on the English Heritage Shout out Loud pages and led to a series of monologues on Google arts and culture, which can be seen .

The R&D phase led to a new play that re-thinks race and gender in the French Revolution, The Ancestors, written by Lakesha Arie-Angelo and directed by Jade Lewis. It was rehearsed, staged and filmed at the Castle in August 2021 with a cast of young performers aged 18-25 from National Youth Theatre’s network of creative young people. The 91¸£Àû contribution to the project was funded with support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The partners explored how their partnership could be a model for creative collaboration and how combining research and co-creation can be empowering for young Black people. English Heritage's Director of Interpretation co-wrote an article with Kate Astbury on the broader possibilities of telling under-told narratives and difficult histories in innovative ways through creative dialogue between research and theatrical practice. See

‘Freedom and Revolution: creative responses to archival research’, Katherine Astbury and Dominique Bouchard , pp. 128-38.

A trailer of the filmed performance in August 2021 on site at Portchester can be seen

And there is more about the production on Google arts and cultures