In the wake of African Renaissance punditocracy, peer review window dressing, Washington-consensus style initiatives like NEPAD, and most recently the paperback Our Common Interest – inspired by the haughty Tony Blair, Lee Blessing’s recent Off Broadway success Going to St. Ives stands to be accused of perpetuating Afro-pessimism.
Blessing, who mastered this type of brinkmanship duologue in his Tony Award winning Cold War piece A Walk in the Woods (1988), sets up a Faustian style bargain between May N’Kame – the dowager mother of an African dictator (who echoes Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa and Charles Taylor) – and Dr Cora Gage, a rather sad British eye surgeon.
Cora is played with great certitude by the dependable Fiona Ramsay. Equally authoritative is the polished hand of director Alan Swerdlow, who has here produced a solid, elegant piece of theatre. Swerdlow keeps the dialogue up-tempo, while well-chosen music from the Cameroon and mbiras from Zimbabwe resonate movingly.
Pamela Nomvete (the lead in Zulu Love Letter) has the right gravitas and makes for a powerful matriarchal May, with her crystal enunciation. As a black woman, she explains in the play, she had to be twice as English as the English to gain cachet. The script favours her too – giving May the punchier lines. When Cora refers to ‘human beings’ she interrupts with “don’t make snap judgements” and scrutinising the heirloom tea service remarks, “what is it, two hundred years out of fashion now?”
An intelligent, often intensely personal and wonderfully unpredictable play, it reaches far beyond simplistic political themes and ideological sparring. Lessing however belabours his rather tangential symbolism, like the blue willow pattern china that seems to represent ancestry and a transcendent civilising bond between the two women.
Theatre on the Bay has had good plays and strong performers of late. Although it is gratifying to see serious dramatic works in a commercial venue that must survive without subsidy, it is a pity budgets did not allow more than a few marooned flats to suggest a set. It could have been close to perfect.
Plays like St. Ives reward the individual in meaningful ways that far exceed the hype of Band Aid rock concerts. Meanwhile the African dictators remain legion, many with names hardly recognised in the West: Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Omar Bongo, Idriss Déby, Al-Bashir…
Going to St Ives revisited
In my notice on Going to St Ives I said the play will stand accused of perpetuating Afro-pessimism and it seems that this has materialised among friends, and I’m accused of playing in to it by listing some of the current dictators in Africa.
However, as I saw it, I understood Lessing as wanting to create a complex drama around ethics and moral dilemmas, and for this, he needed an absolute monster and perhaps rather predictably settled on the first cliché that came to mind – an African monster – modelled mostly on now defunct regimes, yet containing sufficient truth. A staggering number of regimes still use widespread torture. I list a few at the end of my review. There are also in many countries pockets and backyards of ‘legitimate’ regimes where as an example heads really are chopped off in market places. My blind spot was that I have a hangover from defending Brett Bailey’s Big Dada years ago against widespread PC condemnation. It opened after a rehearsal period, which saw three democratically elected (far from free and fair) leaders change their country’s constitutions to extend their terms indefinitely. This time I didn’t re-examine the debate in the light of developments on the continent in recent years.
But I am far from being on the side of a whole lot of old-fart African gainsayers who might have taken nothing from the play, but its background vision of Africa. I should have qualified the way I fore grounded this in my review. So here goes…
Firstly though, I don’t think a writer should be blamed for the projections on to his work, which I know a certain segment of the audience manufactured: that the atrocities of African leaders are worse than atrocities committed by the Western powers all over the world – in the case of the USA – or that they are more barbaric to their own countrymen – witness Bosnia, the Kurds, and of course the Holocaust just 60 years ago in the centre of ‘civilisation’ to put pay to that. Africa has never seen that kind of factory killing, but on a second thought had they the bureaucracy and access to the funds and technology I’m sure we would have seen gas chambers in Rwanda. “Manunkind” as e.e.cummings put it. This is not in Lessing’s script.
I am also extremely wary of dismissing a play, because it isn’t the play I would have liked to see. It is not the job of writers to do PR for political correctness. What if we applied the same sensitivity to image and political correctness to plays not of Africa? A terrifying thought. I also don’t automatically assume that a play is about today and the here and now. I thought it was written in the late 1990s – it felt that way (laser eye surgery for glaucoma has been performed in British hospitals since 1979). It was published in 2003, and has only received critical attention in theatres in 2005. I’m sure Lessing’s vision of Africa is informed by the mainstream media abroad, which kept Charles Taylor’s atrocities in the public conscience. He was toppled in 2003.
I don’t think St Ives is rendered artistically illegitimate because of its now dated background scenario. Rather, what is worthwhile examining is why this play is performed now, and the audience it attracts in this country.
The play is about ethical and moral dilemmas. It is hypothetical. I framed my review with the African issues, as the questions it raises on the moral front required more ink than I had space to discuss and is impossible to review without giving the game away. The joy of this play was for me that it is one of the few instances in what must be a couple of years now that I couldn’t predict the ending by interval.
I fully agree that the problem is that the play invites a stereotyped vision and it would have been a far more interesting play, artistically better too, had the background been about the new democratic dictators and the subtlety involved there. In short, Lessing needs to update his image of the dictator. He made the moral dilemma of assassination too easy. However, at the end, we do get the impression that new forces of revenge genocide have been unleashed by May’s act, and the problem hasn’t been solved.
However ghastly the hypocrisy of the West and their own atrocities, and however sensitive we are about the much abused image of our continent, it would be terrifying if we create no-go zones around political correctness. There are monsters in charge of many African countries as I write this and we need to face up to the fact that the continent (no matter how politically inconvenient this is) remains in a bad way and the statistics are not improving for the majority. The most encouraging development was Sudan not being allowed the presidency of the African Union. Theatrical amplification is a problem if it is racist – and Lessing can’t be accused of that.
The recent tide of political correctness – I list in the opening of my review- is a major threat to the forgotten masses of Africa. I’m not convinced Africa is changing as much as we hope – only its image. The dictators are less overtly crude, less honest – that is more Western in their brutality. Africa’s big men have been admitted into the world club I suppose. No more ‘Emperor’, rather ‘CEO of country X Inc’. Corporate pillage is as rife as ever. The most terrifying development is that these men are attaining legitimacy. Meanwhile Geldolf and co are a sick joke.
