Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History

In March 1936, the play was staged for two performances in the Westminster Theatre in London's West End by the Stage Society, a private club, to avoid Theatres Act censorship laws. It was directed by Peter Godfrey and starred Paul Robeson in the title role, as well as Orlando Martins as Dutty Boukman, Robert Adams as Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Harry Andrews. It was the first time black professional actors featured in a production written by a black playwright in the UK. The play had been presumed lost until its rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005 by historian Christian Høgsbjerg. This revised play became the first production of Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, directed by Yvonne Brewster at the Riverside Studios in London, with Norman Beaton in the title role, coinciding with the overthrow of Baby Doc Duvalier as president of Haiti. In 2019, the book Making the Black Jacobins, written by Rachel Douglas, examined James's lifetime writing and rewriting of the Haitian Revolution as history and drama. == Adaptations ==

The play has been adapted into a graphic novel, by artists Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee, which was published by Verso Books in October 2023. Both Forbes magazine and The Comics Journal included it among their top graphic novels of 2023. File:Tlo-cover.jpg|Front cover of the graphic novel adaption File:Front end papers 2.jpg|Front endpapers File:Front end papers 1.jpg|Front endpapers File:Inside page.jpg|Inside page File:Inside spread.jpg|Inside spread ==Notes==

• C. L. R. James, Toussaint Louverture: The story of the only successful slave revolt in history, Duke University Press, 2012, 240 pp. . • Rachel Douglas, Making the Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James and the Drama of History, Duke University Press, 2019, 320 pp. . • "Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts". Special issue of sx salon 16 (2014), with contributions on the play by Raphael Dalleo, Laura Harris, Jeremy Matthew Glick and Christian Høgsbjerg.