Samuel Takes a Break : in Male Dungeon No. 5 After a Long but Generally Successful Day of Tours

'Every one of us will be here for a different particular reason.I am here because I am passionate about history.'It is 2019, the Year of Return, marking four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in America.We are at a slave castle in Ghana. Samuel is our tour guide. It's his job to give tourists a really, really authentic experience of the castle's dark history, and to do it all with a smile.Thank you, Samuel!The tourists are Samuel's guests, and they're on a journey of self-discovery.But they're here, standing on soil, blood and bones, asking for a selfie.They want to buy trinkets from the gift shop. Samuel would never want to hurt the tourists. And they would never want to hurt him. Rhianna Ilube's Samuel Takes a Break… in Male Dungeon No. 5 After a Long but Generally Successful Day of Tours is a genre-blending play about colonialism, identity and the attempt to preserve the past.It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Playwriting and the Verity Bargate Award, and was a finalist for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.It premiered at The Yard Theatre, London, in 2024, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike.