The Sugar Wife is a play set in Dublin’s Quaker community of 1840. Written by Elizabeth Kuti, an English-Hungarian writer who moved to Dublin in 1993. Maureen McManus interviewed the playwright to explore the process by which the play was written.

The Sugar Wife tells the story of four characters, the main one being Hannah Tewkley, the wife of a sugar and tea merchant in Dublin. As Quakers (a religion of non-violence) she and her husband Samuel welcome into their home, Alfred Darby, a philanthropist, and Sarah Worth, a former slave, who now gives lecture tours. The play deals with the efforts the characters made to live in a world that demands compromise to survive.

How did the play come about?
I was interested in taking the Quakers as a community to write about, a slightly different take on Irish history. I was also interested in ideas about slavery… because the tea and coffee business was very much connected with sugar, which was a slave produce and I thought there might be something interesting to explore there. The idea of a couple who were wealthy and acquiring wealth, who were very high-minded but somehow also compromised by the trade they were involved in. I thought that it might connect with the Celtic Tiger and the huge change in the racial make-up of Dublin where this is a totally new thing in Irish culture, suddenly there is a lot more cultural diversity.

What about the female characters?
I was interested in the idea of someone losing their faith and it was also about someone awakening in many ways -awakening to a recognition that things aren’t black and white - there is a more complex interplay between good and evil forces, and that reflects on Hannah’s own sexuality as well.
Sarah Worth (the former slave) tells the story of her ancestors and what happens on the slave ship (when half the slaves were thrown overboard and murdered) based on the true case of an infamous ship called the Zong, which was instrumental in bringing about the abolition of slavery because people were so horrified by the story, and that real atrocity. The style of the telling is fictionalised.
The issues in the Sugar Wife seem to be coming from a place of Post-colonial anxiety?

Post-colonial anxiety is something that one feels quite acutely as an English person living in Dublin. Of course, you’re feeling a level of guilt or pain about an imperial past, the wrongs of history. You can’t be an English person living in Ireland for that amount of time without thinking about those issues. It might be why I was attracted to writing about this Quaker community, because they are a people who left England to try to escape persecution. It was easier for me to take that perspective, as an outsider than for an Irish person living in Ireland, a feeling of being an outsider from the mainstream culture.

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