Writer and Director: Luis Gayol
In May 1830 Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, takes on board a 14-year-old boy called Orundellico from a nomadic seafaring tribe in the southern part of Tierra del Fuego. The ship’s crew names him Jemmy Button in reference to the large mother-of-pearl pin given to the boy’s father as compensation. Whether the boy’s presence is abduction or voluntary is, like much else in writer and director Luis Gayol’s serviceable history play The Trial of Jemmy Button, open to interpretation. The record suggests neither Jemmy nor his mother thinks he is being taken further than a nearby island.
Overwhelmed by colonial righteousness and bemoaning the “cunning, indolence and lack of intellect” of the tribespeople, Fitzroy (Mark Shaer) chooses to bring Jemmy (Fahad Salman) and three captives from an enemy tribe back to the salubrious environs of Walthamstow, there to be educated in English, Christianity, and civilisation. His aim is to return the newly educated children home after a year or so, able to spread news of religion, agriculture, and the benefits of being open for business to the English. Needless to say, things do not quite go to plan. Charles Darwin (John Terence) records much of what takes place.
Jemmy’s trial refers partly to judicial events three decades later, when Button stands accused of taking part in the murder of eight European missionaries, and partly to the boy’s ongoing challenges in readapting to the harsh conditions of life as a hunter-gatherer. For the rest of his life, Jemmy continues to use English and call himself James. Gayol’s story is of a man shorn of cultural and individual identity by colliding events in which he has almost no agency. The progeny of naked colonial ambition, Jemmy no longer really belongs anywhere.
The Trial of Jemmy Button emerges from the work of Argentinian drama collective Theatre For Identity, part of an artistic response to the search for thousands of babies stolen during that nation’s brutal military dictatorship. One senses Gayol’s aim here is to give a voice to the voiceless; those whose identities have been taken from them.
What frustrates is that a feeling for Jemmy’s character never emerges here. Perhaps that is inevitable: the diaries, letters, journals, and trial transcripts on which the work is based are written by the colonisers and not those who endured colonisation. Ultimately, unfortunately, this leaves Button as an enigmatic oddity rather than a rounded historical figure. Is he a hero or a murderous villain? Gayol’s work, solidly atmospheric as it is, leaves us unable to decide.
Runs until 9 March 2024