The Sugar Wife

Love, lust, prostitution and slavery in a 19th-century Quaker household. New edition published alongside the 2024 revival at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

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'We choose the world we live in. We make it, day by day...'



Dublin, 1850. The delicate balance at the heart of an affluent couple's marriage and family business is challenged when two visitors – a former enslaved woman and her emancipator – come to Ireland to speak to the public about trade, money and the abolition of slavery.



Exploring the dark side of global commodities, Elizabeth Kuti's's play The Sugar Wife offers an engrossing examination of sexual politics and political morality.



The play won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2006. It was first produced by Rough Magic, and performed at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 2005, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London. It was revived, in the version published here, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 2024, directed by Annabelle Comyn.