Set in a university common room, a group of students are plagued by ghosts that keep them awake.

The students, desperate for a night’s sleep, communicate with the ghosts via a Ouija board, which leads them to discover some uncomfortable truths about aspects of British history and its connections with the bloody slave trade.

This is the premise of the play ’Wind/Rush’, performed by the Youth Drama group, based at the Kensington Road Youth Arts Centre for their entry to the UK-wide National Theatre Connections Festival.

Told in a series of episodes, the six students, played by Michael Britton, Allison Ainsworth, Lize-Lellanie Marais, Cal Russell-Dunn, Meg Cracknell and Jess Christian find out about the British links to the slave trade and how they still resonate today, culminating in the realisation that their own university was founded on the back of money from the slave trade.

The three ghosts were personifications of the spirit of the ship, the Empire Windrush, which brought Jamaican immigrants to the British isles in the 1950s, which was formally known as the Monte Rosa.

Amber Moore, Iva Petrova and Jordan McCarthy told the haunting history of the ship, which was formally used by the German navy to transport Norwegian Jews to the concentration camps,

The 18th century massacre of transported slaves on board the British ship Zong, where 130 people were hurled overboard, and the ship owners claimed insurance rewards for damaged cargo, was told in a gripping act that featured Archie Helm as the indifferent ships captain.

Lexi Forbes, and Jonathan Grey featured as a couple of indifferent teenagers playing computer games while discussing racism, and the play was thrillingly opened by a reading of the speech, read by Lydia Hunt, by the MP David Lammy, in 2018, when he famously said: ’If you lay down with dogs, you get fleas’ during the parliamentary discussions surrounding Windrush. The cast was then hounded off stage by a pack of baying dogs.

There were stark and powerful messages throughout the play that were well thought out and terrifically executed by the young cast, who all undertook several lead and supporting roles as the play went on.

It was an incredibly moving and thoughtful play and the strong performances across the stage from the 15-strong cast are bound to turn a few heads when the recording of the play is broadcast in Belfast as part of the festival.