There is something almost vertiginous about watching a piece of theatre that begins with an archival discovery and ends with a royal bloodline. Desirée Baptiste's remarkable one-woman play-poem, performed in the transept of Ripon Cathedral as part of this year's Ripon Theatre Festival, is built around a letter written in 1723 by an anonymous enslaved Virginian — the earliest known written plea for freedom by an enslaved person anywhere in the British Empire — and by the time the final revelations unfold, the history it excavates has reached into corners of English life that you would not have predicted at the outset.

The letter, held in the Church of England's archives at Lambeth Palace Library, was addressed — almost certainly — to William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury. Its writer was of mixed heritage, enslaved by their brother, raised within the Anglican faith, and afforded no time to write except on Sundays. They addressed their plea not merely to a bishop but to the most senior cleric in the Church of England and, in the same breath, to the King. The courage of that act is almost impossible to overstate; what Baptiste discovered, when she examined the document in person, was that its ambition had been hiding in plain sight for three centuries in a single misfiled syllable — the "arch" before "Bishop of London" that redirected the letter's true destination and transformed her understanding of its author entirely. It was that moment of archival revelation that inspired the play, and the meticulousness of the research behind it is evident in every scene.

Ripon Cathedral proves an atmospheric and entirely fitting setting. Baptiste performed on a modest stage beneath the central tower, and she used the space with considerable theatrical intelligence — her movements and facial expressions were judged with precision, and her physical control was commanding throughout. The sole props were a mitre and a commonplace book: objects loaded with meaning in a piece about faith, authority and the act of writing itself. (Those unfamiliar with the commonplace book as a writer's tool will leave, as many in the audience did, feeling quietly inspired to start one.)

The piece announced itself with a negro spiritual, a single voice carrying across the cathedral's stone interior and setting the scene with an economy that more elaborate stagecraft could not have matched. The rhyming couplets and poetic language that followed were delivered with skill and a rhythmical energy that gave the narrative real momentum — though it is fair to note that the pace occasionally ran ahead of some audience members, particularly in the earlier passages where the historical density is at its highest. A Barbados slave chant midway through shifted the register beautifully, deepening the ambience at precisely the right moment.

What Baptiste has achieved, spectacularly, is the fusion of a real story's many strands into a single coherent arc — taking two distinct threads of history and weaving around them a work of genuinely accomplished creative writing. The comedy, when it arrives, earns its place: contemporary references to personal pronouns, Netflix, and a wry nod to The Handmaid's Tale sit alongside a moment of perfectly timed misdirection in which Baptiste conjures the swinging sixties – only to remind the audience, with a deadpan pause, that she means the 1760s. It is the kind of joke that makes a serious point about how easily we locate injustice safely in the past, and the audience's laughter had an edge of recognition to it. This is a parable for today's world as much as a work of historical reclamation, and Baptiste never allows the audience to forget it.

The local resonances, meanwhile, run deeper than you might anticipate. Among the historical figures summoned is one Mildred Porteus, whose genealogical connections to Ripon are commemorated by a memorial plaque in the cathedral itself. Through Edward Porteus, that lineage reaches further still – to Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and thence to the late Queen Mother, to Queen Elizabeth II, and to King Charles III. There is even a Porteus House at Ripon Grammar School. The history of the transatlantic slave trade has a habit of surfacing in the most unexpected places; that is, of course, rather Baptiste's point. There is no room for hiding from it.

The post-show Q&A was as illuminating as the performance itself. An audience that had arrived curious left captivated, and the conversations that emerged – around reparation, around education, around how a story of this scale and significance might reach the widest possible audience – carried an energy that suggested many in the room were thinking the same thought: that this piece deserves a life beyond the festival circuit, whether as a television drama, a radio programme, or a podcast series that could be shown in schools. It is an entirely reasonable ambition.

Baptiste, asked whether performing in a sacred space changes the experience compared with the Edinburgh Fringe, had little hesitation: the cathedral, she said, is the perfect home for this work. Ripon has done it proud. One hopes Chester will not be the only other cathedral to have had the courage and the vision to host it, and that the wider Church of England — whose own archives yielded this extraordinary document — will eventually find its way to the same conclusion.



Ripon Theatre Festival continues for more information click here