From tobacco, sugar and slaves to 21st-century stores selling impossibly cheap, unethically produced clothes, Show of Strength’s latest work brings Bristol’s commercial history slap up against its modern affluence. SOS specialises in making theatre in unusual spaces, and Trade It? is a 100-minute promenade production encompassing cobbled backstreets, office blocks and leafy parks.

Directed by Robin Belfield, it consists of ten short plays by ten writers, each of which takes place in a different location. Some are more arresting than others, but none benefits especially from the al fresco staging, and Belfield makes little of the surrounding architecture and streetlife.

The stories of hardship and exploitation range from slave ships to latterday forms of queasy business arrangement, such as a poor young African man’s marriage to a middle-aged white woman. They offer variety, but few surprises. Near Colston Hall – named after Edward Colston, paradoxically a Bristolian philanthropist and a wealthy slaver – we encounter the wheyfaced Alex, antihero of the contribution by Catherine Johnson, who wrote the book for Mamma Mia! Swigging from a can of lager, he has just been ejected from his father’s funeral for cracking a crass joke over the coffin – one he thought his dad, a bigoted cab driver, would have appreciated.

Alex’s inherited racism is a symptom of the white working-class identity crisis, and he departs a pitiable figure, stumbling into an uncertain future. Sandi Toksvig supplies an acidly funny piece in which a young black man and a white council official – pointedly named Freeman and Miss Masterson – wrangle over PC terminology.

But only Mustapha Matura’s work, performed in the lovely Temple Gardens, displays real complexity and inventiveness. Three black men – a slave, a Sixties immigrant and a modern youth – are literally chained together by shared history. Their white oppressor holds both a gun and the key to their shackles. Which should they snatch first? It’s a potent evocation of the complexities of the fight for freedom and equality.

The acting is vigorous, with Nadia Williams as a wronged ladies’ maid and Dan Winter as the befuddled Alex especially striking. But writers and director could, and should, have taken more risks.

Box office: 0870 4444400, to July 6

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