This musical drama is a reworking of Oroonoko emphasising liberty as a quintessential English value. A reviewer of the time described the opera as 'a positively poor composition, yet compared with others of its tribe it is infinitely preferable.' The role of Gambia, the Slave, was played by actor William Macready and later in 1825 by the famous African-American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, known as the African Roscius.
