Placeholder: Parallel Text

A parallel text version of Catherine Bisset's play Placeholder - in English and French.

Set in motion by academic research by the Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre and Opera Network, a cross-institutional endeavour chaired at St Andrews, Placeholder by Catherine Bisset addresses the stories that are missing from the archives and the holes in the narrative that are themselves acts of suppression.

Synopsis:

It is 1790 in Saint-Domingue, a year and a day before the start of the Haitian Revolution. Minette, a ‘free woman of colour’, waits in a sweltering theatre. She remembers her mother, a courageous and intelligent enslaved woman, and considers her own previous career as an Opera singer. An emotional exchange between mother and daughter reveals the insidious power of divide and rule, the pointlessness of freedom without equality and the importance of resistance. Will Minette find the courage to go back to the Opera or will she remain a ‘Placeholder’?

This version of Placeholder provides the original English version with matching pages in Haitian French, translated by Elisa Finielz. 

Longlisted for the 2024 Kavya Prize.