A Theatre-in-Education piece funded by the Fonthill Foundation exploring the Caribbean soldiers who came to Seaford to fight in WWI
In June 2024, ThirdSpace Theatre visited four schools across the city with a fantastic live presentation of a narrative poem by Dulani Kulasinghe. Two local actors who attended ThirdSpace clubs on free spaces were contracted to rehearse and perform at Hove Park, Varndean, Kings, and Patcham High Schools before the summer holidays. Students who saw the productions were really taken with the subject matter with some expressing that they’d never seen ‘people like them’ represented on stage. Director Tanushka Marah, the actors Miranda Mufema (currently starring in Stranger Things West End) and Anthony Mkandawire, and writer Dulani Kulasinghe held workshops after the performances in writing and acting.
In Brighton most people know the Royal Pavilion was converted into a military hospital for Indian soldiers during the First World War. Less well known is that in 1915, in Seaford – twelve miles east of Brighton – a training camp was hastily built in the town and above the beach on Seaford Head in 1915. Sixteen thousand soldiers from all the islands of the Caribbean came through Seaford on their way to battlefields in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But some never left Seaford – nineteen Caribbean men died in Seaford and are buried in Commonwealth War Graves in Seaford cemetery.
Letters Home is a narrative poem about a young man who travels to Seaford from St Lucia with two friends. Though the poem’s protagonist is an imagined one, all the dates and events in the piece are real, and his voice and observations are grounded in historical research. The poem includes actual speech from the period, including the shocking call to arms at a British military recruiting rally, quoted near the beginning of the poem and found in David Olusuga’s 2014 book The World’s War.
