Part of the public art programme accompanying the development of the historic Wapping Wharf site on Bristol’s harbourside, A Thousand Seasons Past conjures up characters whose lives were shaped by the city’s docks and the gaol that operated in the area for most of the 1800s.

Staged outside in a temporary auditorium on the water’s edge and performed by a sixteen-strong ensemble of young people from Bristol Old Vic’s Young Company, Travelling Light Youth Theatre, and Hanham Wood Academy, the piece is bookended by the stories of John Horwood and Sarah Thomas. John, tormented by unrequited love and jealously, murdered the object of his affections and was the first person to be hanged at the gaol. Sarah was the last: a maid abused and misused by her mistress, she has Cinderella fantasies of escape, but finally snaps and does away with her persecutor.

These aren’t clear-cut cases of right and wrong; they’re stories as muddy and as grey as the docks once were themselves, and Mike Akers’s nimble writing allows the messiness of human lives and conflicts of desire and duty, passion and privilege to resonate across the ages, an underlying preoccupation with social justice ringing home particularly loudly. The impressively committed young cast offer mature and composed performances, with deft ensemble movement and effective choral work, the whole sensitively underscored by Alistair Debling on cello and Hettie Feiler on keys.

It’s a shame that hessian hoardings separate the temporary stage from the ebb and flow of the docks’ human traffic, because this places the piece oddly at a remove from the environment and community with which it’s trying to engage.  Nevertheless, there are some magical moments when you’re reminded that you’re occupying the same space as generations past, and that then too cawing seagulls wheeled in the air on warm, breezy August evenings.