Details

The American Deep South. A pickup truck carrying white supremacists. An African-American man abducted. Hate-crime in the age of Donald Trump as the ugly face of racism reasserts itself. A true story from the past is reimagined and reset in the present. A one-man show where an actor plays different roles, providing a visceral account of the violence of racism. Ride is a play about a very important subject - racism, a theme never absent from human interaction but which has come into sharp focus recently. Following the decision to leave the EU, naked aggression came to the fore with a 78% rise in race-hate crimes. In the US, Donald Trump was sensationally elected president, emboldening racial attacks, both verbal and physical, with extreme right-wing organisations such as the Klu-Klux-Klan re-emerging as a violently fascist presence. The history and background of this case are subject to intensive research, although the dramatisation is a free adaptation, an imaginative interpretation uninhibited by factuality. The modern-day narrative was inspired by the racist murder of James Byrd, an African-American killed by white supremacists in Texas, June 1998. Byrd was chained to the back of a truck and dragged three miles along an asphalt road. Conscious throughout, he died when his body hit a culvert.

Creatives/Company

Author: John Foster