Sarah Forbes Bonetta

Sarah Forbes Bonetta occupies one of the most psychologically intricate positions in Tanika Gupta's The Empress: she is a Yoruba princess taken from West Africa, presented to Queen Victoria as a diplomatic offering, and subsequently raised within the machinery of the British court. By the time the play's action unfolds she has been educated, dressed, and displayed as living proof of empire's civilising pretension. Yet she is not passive material. She is acutely observant, formally composed, and possesses a restrained fury that surfaces most clearly when she is away from Victoria's immediate gaze. Gupta presents her as simultaneously the court's most celebrated colonial subject and its sharpest internal critic — a woman who has mastered every protocol demanded of her while understanding, with painful precision, exactly what that mastery costs.

Sarah's arc is not one of outward rebellion but of inward clarification. She begins the play already deep inside the colonial bargain: she has accepted its terms because the alternatives — abandonment, erasure, a return to a homeland that no longer exists for her — are not meaningfully available. Her motivation, therefore, is survival with self-knowledge intact. Across the play she moves from a position of managed performance toward one of lucid, if privately held, recognition. She names — in private speech and in charged exchanges with other characters of colour — what the other imperial favourites are only beginning to perceive: that Victoria's love is real and colonial at the same time, that these two facts do not cancel each other, and that closeness to power is not the same as possessing it. Her journey does not end in freedom; it ends in a kind of unflinching clarity, which Gupta presents as its own form of dignity.

In the court scenes Sarah performs the role expected of her with seamless grace — grateful, elegant, impeccably spoken — but Gupta consistently undercuts this surface with asides and private moments in which Sarah steps outside the performance and names it for what it is. These shifts in register are among the play's most technically striking devices, and they belong almost uniquely to Sarah's character. Her conversations with Abdul Karim carry particular weight: when she identifies his elevation by Victoria as structurally identical to her own, she articulates the play's central thesis more directly than any other character. Equally significant are the moments in which she contemplates the Rani of Jhansi's defiant resistance — scenes that function as a quiet, devastating audit of the price Sarah has paid for assimilation. Her scenes with Victoria herself are the most emotionally compressed: the Queen's affection is visibly genuine, which makes Sarah's awareness of its conditional, ornamental quality all the more difficult to witness.

Victoria is the knot at the centre of Sarah's existence. The Queen's fondness is not fabricated, and Gupta does not let Sarah dismiss it as such — which is precisely what makes it so oppressive. Sarah was a diplomatic gift, a transaction dressed as benevolence, and every expression of Victoria's love carries the weight of that original purchase. Their intimacy is suffocating because it is sincere.

Abdul Karim is Sarah's most significant peer relationship in the play. Both have been elevated as symbols of empire's supposed generosity; both navigate the court through careful self-presentation. Sarah recognises the Munshi's situation with a wariness born of experience — she understands how quickly the court's approval can calcify into resentment, and she watches his rising influence with the kinship of someone who has already learned what he is still discovering.

The Rani of Jhansi, whether encountered directly or refracted thematically, functions as Sarah's road not taken. Open resistance rather than strategic assimilation: the Rani throws into sharp relief every accommodation Sarah has made and demands she account for it.

Lord Salisbury represents the institutional cold behind Victoria's personal warmth. His presence reminds Sarah — and the audience — that the court's affection rests on a political architecture that has no sentiment whatsoever.