Maud at Vault Festival

Maud, a modern-day lynching, is a Verbatim play about the February 23, 2020 murder of 25 year-old Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery, a former high school football standout, by three white men in Satilla Shores, Georgia. A video recording of the slaying of Maud by one of the assailants opened the door for a trial that gripped the world in the middle of a global pandemic.

The trial of his accused killers also brought up issues of policing — although in this case, it involved questions about private citizens and their rights to detain people who they believe to be breaking the law. Those rights in Georgia were spelled out in a controversial Civil War-era statute that was significantly weakened by state lawmakers in direct response to the outrage over the Arbery killing. Lawmakers passed Georgia’s first-ever hate crimes law as a result of the incident.

Maud is a powerful, heart-wrenching play using verbatim text and video footage to show the parallels between the modern-day issues of policing and the black community, racism and lynchings through the lens of the sustained 5-minute chase and attack on Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery that resulted in his unprovoked murder.

What this play does incredibly well is link together all the different elements acting as an undercurrent to the event to show the race issues in America as a whole and why they shouldn’t be viewed in isolation.  The use of verbatim text and audio footage is shocking and eye-opening to hear and hearing them as they are in context is incredibly shocking and powerful.

Both performers Perry Williams and Jeffrey Miller perform fantastically here and the character performances are particularly fantastic to watch.  The lighting and audio-visual elements designed by Roberto Esquenazi Alkabes are incredibly well done and effective.  The video and images provide key context to some of the events discussed as well as acting as part of the set at other times.  Its use as a live map to track the crime’s route is key for the audience to be able to tell exactly what happened and visualise the day’s event whilst the live video captured during the crime is hard to watch, but that is exactly the point of this show.

Maud is a powerful and emotional play that brings attention to one of the biggest crises, that of murderous racism, going on in the world at the moment and how so little has changed over time.  Maud is part of Vault Festival.

Tickets to this show were gifted in exchange for a review, all words and opinions are my own