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Showing posts with label Old Vic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Old Vic. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
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‘Just Me, You and the Silence’ by Judy Adong is a play with noble aims, and one which sets its sights high. It's about LGBT rights in Uganda, one of the most cripplingly repressive places in the world to be gay or lesbian. Homosexual activity, both male and female, is illegal, and gays and lesbians must live with routine discrimination and legal restrictions. There is also an underlying risk of physical harassment; newspapers such as ‘Red Pepper’ and ‘Rolling Stone’ have published lists of names and addresses of gay Ugandans while calling for them to executed. One of the people named, David Kato, a prominent LGBT rights and advocacy officer for SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda) was beaten to death with a hammer in his home in January 2011. On top of all this misery, there's been repeated attempts to introduce legislation popularly known as the “Kill the Gays bill”, which calls for the death penalty for anyone committing ‘the offence of aggravated homosexuality’.
This is not a very bright and breezy situation, to say the least. Imagine what it is like to live in constant fear of your safety, never knowing who to trust and where members of your government are actively seeking to implement legislation that might result in you standing, rope resting around your shoulders, black hood on head, hearing the muffled sounds of people around you and then the soft click of the trapdoor opening and sudden weightlessness and then? The best you could hope for is they kill you cleanly. So when I went out on a chilly November night to see a play about LGBT issues in Uganda I wasn’t expecting a very cheery night out.
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| Not cool guys! |
And yet I laughed my head off nearly all the way through it. It’s a consciously funny play from start to finish, and ridiculously entertaining. This was in many ways a huge relief. I try to keep informed as to what’s going on in the African LGBT community, and I care deeply about the issues underlying situations like those currently happening in Uganda. So before seeing the play I was worrying what I’d write about it if it was awful, or even if it was just crushingly miserable throughout. Adding to this mild sense of dread was that this wasn’t even a full production. It was a benefit reading, which means uncostumed actors standing in a row with lecterns in front of them and reading from scripts, as far as I could tell totally unrehearsed. So if a play has flaws, they're only going to be exaggerated.
Fortunately Adong clearly knows what the hell she’s doing. Vile though it is, much of the language, rhetoric and logic behind the “Kill the Gays Bill” is ridiculous enough to stray into the realm of the darkly funny. If you want to prick somebody’s self-importance, then making them into a figure of fun is one of the more effective ways of doing it. Here, Adong deftly confronts the supporters of these monstrous bills with the logical consequences of their actions.
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| It's horrifying. But language like this has got to be ripe for satire. |
‘Just Me, You and the Silence’ tells the story of a Ugandan MP named Jacob Obina (seemingly based on David Bahati MP) and his family. Jacob and his wife Grace are aspirational social climbers and Jacob sees introducing a strict anti-homosexuality bill as his ticket to a life of luxury and fame. His cohorts in this are Pastor Ddumba (based on Martin Ssempa) and Mary Rose who run a church, and Buntu Muntu (an analogue for Simon Lokodo), a government minister. All see this bill as a way to propel them on a wave of popular sentiment forward in life. Less enthusiastic are Jacob's two sons: Giden just wants to be left alone to get on with a budding music career, and Mathias wants to escape to New York to attend university.
What drives the narrative is that Mathias is secretly gay. He’s torn between loyalty to his mother and father, who are wholly reliant on the passing of the anti-gay laws for financial security, and his activist friends Victoria and Thomas who are underground LGBT political activists.
If this unlikely situation were played seriously it would feel pretty contrived and cloying. But Adong recognises the farcical elements inherent to the situation, and almost every twist and turn the story takes is milked for laughs. I thought it was interesting that those trying to enact the anti-gay legislation are not necessarily portrayed as cackling, cartoon villains. They merely see this bill as the most expedient way to get what they want out of life. Jacob in particular is a likeable and funny man, which makes it very jarring when he slips into rabidly anti-gay language. This humanising process is a clever way to approach the situation. An aggressive front-on attack would be totally justified and very cathartic but also unlikely to change anyone’s mind. But while the play never shirks from presenting a powerful and convincing argument it does so with a relatively light touch, and with good humour.
In fact, I was so taken aback by how funny the play was and how readily the audience embraced it as a comedy that for a while I felt a bit uneasy. We are laughing at situations that, while they may sound utterly ridiculous to the ears of a London theatre audience, are deadly serious to a Ugandan gay person desperately frightened of being outed.
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| Judy Adong |
The genesis production was when Adong was confronted by the discrepancy between what Ugandan politicians and media said gay people were like, and her personal experience of meeting and working a gay man:
“This experience made me see that the value of a human being is not measured by his or her sexuality. It also made me realise that one day I could wake up and find someone I knew and loved being put to the noose and I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Like so many Ugandans, I had been in denial that anyone I knew could be gay.” – Judy Adong
The notion of the homosexual as the other, the outsider or the interloper seems to run right through the anti-gay propaganda put forward by the church and state. Gay people are painted as un- African and as trying to actively convert people’s children to the ‘gay cause’. We see the characters in this play actively engaging in this othering, explaining in a wickedly funny sequence how to ‘spot a gay man’ by his clothes or behaviour. All the while, the father in the play unknowingly holds up his gay son Mathias as a shining example of African manhood. We have it demonstrated to us in the clearest possible way the consequences of assuming that it's other people’s children or family members who are gay. It's this message that stands out over all else, and the play asks: how would you feel if it was your son or daughter whose neck was in the noose?
Its important to consider why this notion of the destructive other in society has such a strong pull in Ugandan society. Uganda is a former British colony, gaining independence from Britain in 1962 and like many former colonies is fiercely (and in my opinion rightly) protective of its right to self-governance. Interference from the West is regarded with intense suspicion, and financial aid often comes with strings attached. Gay rights are commonly viewed as a prime example of Western cultural imperialism; at best an example of an overly secular too-liberal West, and at worst an active attempt to poison the well of African masculinity. This allows anti-gay campaigners to seductively frame their arguments as an integral part of Ugandan or pan-African nationalism.
Adong exposes the hypocrisy of this argument through the character of Pastor Ddumba. He is shown as being in the thrall of a US megachurch who keep him on a tight leash through their funding of his church. Pastor Ddumba is generally fairly authoritative throughout most of the play, so it’s pretty funny to see him become so obsequious and grovelling whenever he has to talk to his US financier over the phone. This relationship seems to be based on the real-life links between the Nevada Canyon Ridge megachurch, and Martin Ssempa, who Ddumba parodies. The argument goes that the US evangelical right sees the war on homosexuality in the US as pretty much a lost cause, and are far happier to fight a proxy war on homosexuality in Africa. So, we see him going from decrying foreign interference in one scene, to frantically licking the boot of the US evangelicals in the next. What’s nice is that the play never preaches this to us, but any thinking person watching it can draw their own conclusions pretty easily. The most persuasive thinker we know, after all, is ourselves.
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| From the Ugandan Gay Pride Parade (!!) in 2012 - these are very brave people. |
Considering that these actors who had very little (if any) rehearsal time, the quality of the performances was excellent. Deserving particular praise is David Gyasi as Jacob, and Arnold Oceng as his son Giden. Both of them very quickly defined their characters not just as well-rounded, but also very as likeable people. Even from behind a lectern and with a script in their hands they gave us a peek into the physicality of these characters, which makes the play that much funnier and the characters more relatable. I had feared that a read through of a play would be a dry, academic exercise, but they breathed life into the story even with very limited resources.
Despite this being a very fast-moving, entertaining play there are a few slow patches. At various points the play lapses into fantasy sequences where we get a visualisation of a particular character’s fantasy life. So for example we see Grace, Jacob’s wife dreaming of being interviewed as First Lady and treated as an iconic political and cultural figure. It’s a nice way of getting into the character’s heads and helping us understand their motivations, but these scenes bring the narrative to a screeching halt, and ultimately we're being shown things we should have already worked out for ourselves. The only other criticism I’d make is that throughout the play we have someone to the side of the stage reading aloud the stage directions. This was fine, but in the final moments of the play he read out a direction for a minute’s silence. I can’t see any reason why they couldn’t actually do the minute’s silence in the read through rather than simply tell us about it. Not having any silence before the end totally undercut the drama and profundity of the last line of the play, which is a shame.
But these are minor criticisms and this was a wonderful night. Judy Adong has provided gay rights campaigners in Uganda with a potent weapon in their fight against homophobia. The play is funny and entertaining while also having a white-hot core of anger and righteousness. Her ambition is to perform this play in Kampala, Uganda and I firmly believe that one day she will achieve her dream. As this work amply demonstrates, it is not homosexuality that tears the fabric of society apart; it is bigotry, divisiveness and ignorance.
It’s a relief to be able to highly recommend this play not just because I wholeheartedly believe in its message, but because it’s also highly insightful and hilarious satire with excellent characterisation.
Many thanks to the wonderful people at the Old Vic who donated their beautiful theatre for the reading and to the actors and production staff who gave up their free time to work unpaid for our entertainment. If anyone would like to know more about this issue please check out the Kaleidoscope Trust. They organised this night and are an excellent organisation that does sterling and brave work.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
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Walking into a play like Michael Frayne's ‘Democracy' carries with it its own set of worries. I know vaguely that it's about the machinations of politicians in West Germany in the early 70s, this, to be honest, doesn't sound like a whiteknuckle thrillride. My knowledge of postwar West German politics is pretty basic, and creeping around the back of my mind was the fear that I’d signed myself up for an evening of very dry and worthy political drama. At first, I feel like these fears are all coming true. The stage is rapidly populated by a group of middle-aged and elderly men in suits, and without much explanation we’re thrown into a complex world of coalitions and acronyms: SDP, CDU, FDP. For the first third of the play I’m more preoccupied by trying to work out who is who and how these characters inter-relate to each other. It’s hard going. I begin to wish I’d done a bit of pre-reading as to who the characters in this play are and what they're doing.
The play concerns the intertwined lives of two men: German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and his assistant Gunter Guillaume. Brandt was a popular and charismatic, Nobel prize winning politician seemingly adored by his public. Guilluame was one of his closest aides, living and working with Brandt for years. But Guilluame was also a deep cover spy working for the East German Stasi, feeding them confidential information on Brandt for years. When Guillaume was exposed, it led to the resignation and disgrace of Brandt, arguably to the detriment of both West and East Germany.
The two men initially seem quite different, Brandt seems like a born leader and orator, a man able to sense public opinion, to make people love and believe in him. Guillaume on the other hand is ingratiating, eager-to-please and submissive, a character that lurks in the periphery of rooms, trying to become part of the scenery. The men come from starkly different political backgrounds which inform much of their personalities, Brandt seems to effortlessly swim through the murky waters of parliamentary democracy, while Guillaume comes from the authoritarian and repressive East Germany. As the two men bond and discover they have more in common than they initially thought, the emotional stakes are raised. Guillaume begins to desperately worry about what might happen to Brandt if he was uncovered as a spy.
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| Willy Brandt (Patrick Drury) and Gunter Guillaume (Aidan McArdle) |
The relationship between the two men in terms of spy and subject is somewhat unique. Guillaume is not under orders to sabotage Brandt, or to try and undermine, rather he is there so the East Germans can try to understand the man, and found out what makes him tick. The tragedy of this relationship is that in doing this the two men come to implicitly trust each other. Guillaume eventually begins to love the man he is lying to every day, and develops an appreciation of the thrills of parliamentary politics. Meanwhile, Brandt comes to rely on Guillaume’s organisational and bureaucratic skills, and his understanding of how to cheer him up.
Once I understood the nature of this relationship and had gotten to grips with the personalities of these men, the play becomes much easier to digest. Patrick Drury as Brandt has a fairly complex task in portraying a man who can be marching in front of a crowd giving an inspiring speech one moment, and sitting crumpled in his office in a depressive fugue the next. Whenever he makes a speech an echoing, booming effect is added to the actor’s voice, making us feel every portentous and inspiring word, as if he is speaking to us clearly through the fog of history. Even though he’s dynamic and successful, Drury imbues him with a sense of tragic vulnerability. He is surrounded by venal, backstabbing colleagues, and he alone seems like a true idealist and visionary. We hear about his womanising and his drinking, but these flaws somehow serve only to throw into sharp contrast his positive points. This is helped by scenes where Brandt tells us about his past dodging the Gestapo during World War II, there is a tenderness and emotional nakedness to the performance which is unnerving in a portrayal of a politician, and makes his eventual discovery of Guillaume’s betrayal that much more tragic.
Aidan McArdle has a dual role to play as Guillaume: character and narrator. He tells us the story in the past tense, often ‘pausing’ the action to explain what’s going on, or to explain his thoughts at a particular moment. His East German origins are known to the other characters, and this throws him open to some suspicion, although he manages to deflect it through most of the play, mainly by his sycophancy and harmless, bumbling persona. In the first half of the play, before he gains Brandt’s respect he is looked down upon by his colleagues, being described as ‘greasy’ and disparaged for only having experience of running a photocopying shop. McArdle’s body language in these early scenes is great, he’s always hunched over, almost hiding behind the files he’s sorting through. He’s seemingly succeeding in becoming ‘part of the furniture’, while behaving manically as narrator while the play is on 'pause'. As the pressure mounts, McArdle does a great job of showing the stress and guilt caused by espionage and undercover work. His handler is omnipresent throughout the play, perched smoking just outside of the main action, a constant observer of his actions. We can almost taste Guillaume's sweat as the pincers close in on him. This is a not altogether likeable character, after all, his very nature is to lie to those the audience is set up to admire, but McArdle manages to make us feel the pain of his betrayal and his growing guilt and paranoia at being exposed as a spy.
The rest of the cast all perform admirably, especially William Hoyland as Herbert Wehner, who looks and acts like an sinister Tony Benn. Also excellent is David Cann, who I pretty much could watch in anything. The roles outside of Brandt and Guillaume aren’t the most compelling though, especially as they tend to appear onstage as a crowd rather than individually, making their personalities somewhat indistinct. By far the best scenes in the play are those where Brandt and Guillaume bond one on one, and learn about each other. The tension of the play ratchets up a few notches whenever it’s just the two of them on stage, and slackens when they’re joined by the crowd. I suppose if you’re going to do a semi-biopic you need to show these other politicians to tell the full historical story, but from a dramatic point of view they seem to distract the audience, turning our attention away from the central relationship that drives the narrative.
Another interesting aspect of the casting is that this is an all-male play. I can appreciate the argument that this is necessitated by the patriarchal nature of politics at this time, but there are female characters referred to, we just never see them. Women in this play are generally relegated to either an element that undermines the characters (Guillaume’s wife’s request for divorce or the prostitutes that play a major part in Brandt’s downfall) or some distant element of a crowd looking up at you. I’m not entirely sure what the play is trying to achieve by this, it is a curiously sexless piece, seemingly more concerned with politics than romance. I suppose it is possible that any other romantic bond would distract from the central bond between Brandt and Guillaume, but a total lack of women seems like a deliberate and slightly puzzling decision.
This isn't the most immediately accessible play around. It throws the audience right into the deep end, and even up until the interval I wouldn’t say that I had a total grasp of what was going on. In fact, once the interval was over, quite a lot of people didn’t bother coming back for the second half. I can’t really blame them, there’s about an hour and a half before the interval. If you get that far into a play and it’s not doing anything for you then I think you can be forgiven for giving up on it.
But this is a shame, while the first half can at times seem like a barely disguised information dump, it pays off in the second half when the play deals with more understandable human interactions and emotions. It’s a far more interesting play once they don’t need to worry about setting things up, and it fascinatingly explores how different personalities can bond, how we ‘each contain a multitude’ and how political beliefs influence our interactions.
I did have a slight issue with the humour though. The play has farcical elements, but a lot of laughs come from “are things so different in modern British politics?” subtle winks. This kind of knowing, ironic humour doesn’t really do much for me, relying as it does on political science injokes that serve to make the people that 'get it' feel clever. Obviously I don’t have a problem in a play using the events of the past as a mirror of the contemporary government, but these events don’t really work as a point of comparison. Some of the biggest laughs are gotten from the fact that the Social Democratic Party Brandt belongs to is in a shaky political coalition with the 'Free Democratic Party', who are referred to as “The Liberals”. This play was written in the early 2000s, but now lines about the Liberals being ‘difficult coalition partners’ cause knowing chuckles in the audience. It’s unearned laughter, especially as the Liberal Democrats are for the most part very compliant coalition partners. As far as I can see there is no point of comparison between these two coalitions, and the humour seems to be predicated on the fact that the two parties have the same name. I guess this is maybe more of a problem with the audience than with the production, but if you’re going to even vaguely suggest that this play is somehow allegorical then I think you should follow through with it.
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| (the real) Willy Brandt kneels in contrition in Warsaw |
Despite these criticisms, this is, for the most part, a powerful and affecting piece of drama. A scene where Brandt spontaneously kneels in front of a monument to those killed in the Warsaw ghetto is powerfully staged and lit, and manages to capture the gravitas of the moment. Other outstanding scenes are a relaxed conversation between Guillaume and Brandt on holiday in Norway, where Brandt very subtly raises the tension and probes Guillaume about the nature of spying - you could hear a pin drop in the theatre! Even though the Old Vic has a fairly expansive stage, this production manages to capture a cramped atmosphere, a time of meetings in poorly lit offices with bundles of paper everywhere. A nice factor is the smell of cigarette smoke. Guillaume’s handler smokes through the play, observing events dispassionately. The smell adds another sensual layer to the performance, sucking you even further into the past and the complex political and personal power games.
This isn’t a play for everyone. It’s wilfully hard to follow at first, occasionally a little dull and hardly spectacular to look at. But once you’ve digested the motivations, setting and characters, you’ll find a surprisingly personal, touching and quietly humanistic piece of theatre.
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