Today's paper this evening - Theatre Review SALT

Selina Thompson is worth her Salt on stage

By Stephen Weir

I have a fist-sized lump of salt on my desk.  Unlike actress Selina Thompson, I don’t know what I am supposed to do with it. “Just, mind you, don’t put this in your mouth,” she warned me when she handed over the rough pink triangle of rock salt. “This is for thinking on, not eating.”

“ It was a piece of salt that convinced me I should continue living,” the young British actress told an almost full North Toronto theatre on Thursday night.

As she has done at performances around the world, Thompson ended her one-woman play, SALT, by racing out to the front of the house in time to give each and every one of her departing members of the audience chunks of salt so we could ponder life too.  After watching her on stage pulverizing a block of salt while she was riffing on slavery, European racism and the utter freedom of walking the streets of Jamaica while Black, Thompson left us with scads to think about.

The hour-long play had not been a typical one-woman performance where an actress talks and talks and talks while the audience sits in the dark and listens.  Her play, which has already got rave reviews in Australia, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Ireland, and now Canada, is an Action Jackson sort of show. Thompson, a very big woman with a quiet disposition, cleanses her bad memories of the racism she has endured by smashing hunks of rock salt with a deadly construction site sledgehammer.

We know from the start that we are going to see some heavy lifting on stage. When we walked into the dark theatre, Thompson was already waiting. She is an imposing presence who smiles hello but in a no-nonsense manner, points out the safety goggles on each seat that MUST be worn whenever she pounds salt.

Her solo show is self-described as being about grief, ancestry, home, forgetting and colonialism. “ Along the way we get very physical – Work, Sweat.” As she explains, “in the end, this is a coming-of- age story, a personal story of a long journey and coming home – that is what all the great stories are. In fact, that is what Lord of the Rings is all about too.”

Thompson was born in Leeds, England and raised by adopted parents, originally from Jamaica.  Her birth parents, Rastafarians, were also from Jamaica, and she has a grandparent she has never seen, living in Montserrat.

Back in 2016, the 20-something-year old artist was suffering from an inner rage, fuelled by the second-class insults and the constant question of “where are you really from”? She knew she had to get out of Europe to write her next play. – “Europe is awash in blood – it is a place of death”.   She felt that a sea journey that regularly travels the long ago Transatlantic Slave Triangle was just the ticket. So she bought passage on a cargo ship, that retraces the route: England to Ghana to Jamaica, and back.  Salt is a play about that trip.

Although supportive of her art, her adopted parents were concerned for the safety a single black woman travelling to Ghana on a freighter. “If something happens to you,” her father told her, “No one there will care.”

It turned out that the Italian freighter she boarded was captained by a racist “master” who kept calling her the N-word to her face every day of the long two- month slow boat ride to Africa. She was confined to her windowless cabin, had no phone service with the outside world and was forcefully kept from leaving the ship when it made port.

She does complete the journey and does make it home again. The memories of that trip, her reflections on the original slave trade and the sheer joy in walking freely in Jamaica, make up the Salt storyline. 

For the author/actress, the boat ride was a long journey backwards through grief and guilt but ultimately lets her go forward in life – to write and to act nightly with Broadway-like perfection.

Salt ran for a week at the Sony Performance Centre’s Studio Theatre (Yonge and Sheppard).  After collecting a carry-on full of four-star reviews from the Toronto newspapers, Selina Thompson packed up her sledgehammer and her goggles and headed to the United States to continue showing the world that she is indeed worth her salt on any stage.