Jane Plastow

Jane Plastow in Africa

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Prof. Jane Plastow, one of the influential academics in the field of African Theatre who have for some decades populated the University of Leeds, and run the Studio Theatre there. We took The Dilemma of a Ghost there back in 2007 - undoubtedly the best informed audience we had for that piece of African theatre in the UK! I'd always mentally grouped Jane with Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Michael Etherton, David Kerr and our former Chair the late Alastair Niven as the pioneers who made the study of African literatures, and especially performance, not only legitimate but essential for modern scholarship. Reading the obituaries, I realise that Jane was actually quite a bit younger than the rest of that coterie: she was 66. Professors are supposed to keep on generating research long after most others have retired, so it's all the sadder that Jane has gone. 

That doesn't mean she hasn't left a terrific legacy. I got to know her as one of the Editors of the excellent series of books on African Theatre: I've contributed to several volumes and always loved the breadth of material included, which always embraces practitioners as well as scholars.  Unlike the British theatre, which likes to practice a weird inverse snobbery towards the academy, African theatres flourish in academic settings - most notably the University of Ibadan's Department of Theatre Arts. African theatre-makers knew that Jane's work mattered: no less a figure than Wole Soyinka attended her inaugural lecture. This synergy is related to the importance of theatre to activism in African contexts: it's no accident that one of Jane's edited books is called Theatre Matters.  For her and her African colleagues, theatre absolutely matters. It is part of liberation struggles, education, empowerment and democracy. The rest of us should learn from it.

Jane's activism was passed on to her son William: and it adds to the sadness of her early death that it has happened while William is being detained for his role in the Palestine Action protest against the Elbit Systems factory in August last year. His trial date has been set for April 2026, meaning that he will have been detained for 21 months before he is finally tried. Jane believed this to be the longest anyone will have ever been held in jail awaiting trial on protest-related charges. Custody time limits clearly state that defendants should not spend more than six months in jail awaiting trial. 

Jane was understandably outraged at the way her son was being treated. Even if Palestine Action is to be regarded as a terrorist organisation (and I emphatically believe that it should not), William is certainly not guilty of crimes against people or threatening lives. Jane had offered £50,000 bail, and agreed that William could live in her house, with all internet access removed, his body tagged, his phone and passport confiscated, and still the bail was denied.

It is deeply distressing that Jane has passed away with her son's case remaining unresolved.

The African Novel

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the BBC programme

I'm a great fan of David Olusoga. Over the last few months, he's been particularly impressive, not only making some superb historical documentaries (A House Through Time from Bristol being a case in point), but also keeping his cool and arguing coherently in the face of absurd online arguments around Black Lives Matter, the toppling of statues etc. The timely repeat of Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (an important inspiration for THE GREAT EXPERIMENT) was provocative and moving. Last night, I watched his new documentary on the African novel: Africa Turns the Page - The Novels that Shaped a Continent.  It's on i-Player for the next month, and well worth watching.

The programme started (of course) with Heart of Darkness, and the pioneering role of Chinua Achebe in claiming the form for himself in Things Fall Apart. But, as the programme went on, I found myself becoming disturbed by a teleological subtext, which seemed to suggest that the African novel, originating in Africa, has now become a "global" phenomenon, triumphant in it conquest of international markets.  There were lots of shots of Booker dinners, with the acceptance speeches of Ben Okri and Bernardine Evaristo.  There was a great celebration of Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer as "a novel that everybody is reading." I couldn't help feeling that Chinua Achebe would have been very surprised to be told that "everybody" spoke English, lived in the Western world, and could afford the latest bestseller. I have absolutely no objection to the prizes, authors and novels in question - in fact, I thought Girl, Woman, Other quite stunning - but I do worry that a documentary about post-colonial literature should see the validation of that literature in terms of global (for which read globalised, Western) markets, and prizes bestowed in the former imperial centre.

The novel is, of course, a globalised form in a way that theatre is not.  There were theatre-makers included in the programme, but they were tellingly discussed only in terms of the novels they had written. This seemed particularly obtuse in the case of Wole Soyinka, whose work has been predominantly in theatre, and only occasionally in the novel. Watching this programme, you would have thought the Nobel prize was awarded for Season of Anomy alone. But perhaps the more telling figure for this discussion is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ also appeared in the programme, again discussed solely in terms of his novels, and not as a theatre-maker. Because of this, his hugely important decision to write in his native Gĩkũyũ, rather than the élite global English, seemed almost absurd. He was contrasted with the apparently more cosmopolitan Achebe, whose use of English was regarded as somehow more progressive. It was patronisingly explained that the use of Gĩkũyũ "wasn't really a problem", because the novels could be translated into English. Of course this is true, and from English they can also be translated into other African languages, much in the way that Girish Karnad used to translate his Kannada plays into English so that they could then be translated into other Indian languages. But the implication of the programme was that translation into English - the language of the Booker - was an end in itself. The programme included clips from Gavin Esler's Hard Talk interview with Ngũgĩ, but not the bit where he points out the absurdity of the Caine Prize for African Literature being confined to work written in English. 

Ngũgĩ's son, interviewed in the programme, did say that writing in Gĩkũyũ meant "his mother could read it" - but it also meant that all the other Gĩkũyũ could as well. It was through his work in theatre that Ngũgĩ, who has long been aware of African culture as oral rather than literary, came to the realisation that language choices are central. Ngũgĩ had already written novels that were socially and politically critical when he began the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Popular Theatre experiment, so brilliantly described in his book Decolonising the Mind. It was the staging of plays in Gĩkũyũ that led to his imprisonment and subsequent exile (as well as that of his collaborator Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, whom I was lucky enough to meet in Zimbabwe), and to the forced closure of the theatre group.  As Fancis Wade has argued in the New York Review of Books:

His play had been critical of the regime of Jomo Kenyatta, also a Gĩkũyũ; it depicted the leadership as inward-looking and elitist, far removed from the Kenyan peasantry whose interests it claimed to champion, and responsible for the acute economic inequalities that persisted long after independence. But, then again, the books he’d written before in English had similarly taken aim at postcolonial power-holders. Could it be that his crime, even long after Kenya had returned to indigenous rule, was to shun the English language? Had his jailers—among them, political leaders who had been the vanguard in the anticolonial struggle—taken up the mantle of linguistic authoritarianism from the same foreign power they had driven out? And did his use of the vernacular threaten the leadership by speaking directly to the masses not literate in English, thereby continuing the anticolonial struggle, in effect, après la lettre?

This is spot on, and underlines the importance of writers like Ngũgĩ shunning the glittering prizes of the global stage for an engagement with the realities of African societies. Of course it's great that his novels, and his plays, have been translated into English: I wouldn't be able to discuss him otherwise, and his exile in America would be pretty challenging.  But wouldn't it also be helpful if the work of African writers in English could be translated into African vernaculars?  Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the most translated of all African novels, yet of the 61 languages listed on this website, only 9 are African languages, and Gĩkũyũ is not among them.  To put that in perspective, there are around 2,000 different languages spoken on the continent.  

Imperious spaces

Hellerau

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Germany for a meeting on our MORE THAN WORDS project, and took the opportunity to pop down to Dresden, where Avatâra Ayuso was showing her extraordinary new dance piece UKI - a collaboration with Ink elder Naulaq Ledrew.  I'll probably have more to say about the performance at a future time - today I want to write a bit about the theatre itself, and some thoughts it stirred around space, history and culture.

Hellerau is on the outskirts of Dresden.  Travelling there does not feel like a journey to a major European arts space: the suburb sits within a forest, and is deliberately not "urban".  It was built in the early 20th century, as Eastern Germany's version of the Garden City movement - with the vast Festival Theatre incongruously surrounded by rather twee, Hansel-and-Gretel style workers cottages. The theatre site, on the other hand, is vast and imposing.  It reminded me of the Cartoucherie in Paris - partly because of its sheer scale and the resonance of workmanlike celebration in the spaces, and partly because, like that disused ammunition factory, it carries a military history.  That's good for a theatre - these are spaces where explosions should happen...  

In the case of Hellerau, however, engaging with the history remains a challenge, to say the least.  The theatre's website coyly remarks: "in the 1930s it served as a military camp; later the Soviet army used it as their barracks."  The 1930s were, of course, the Nazi era - and it's clear how the combination of the theatre's austere and imposing facade and its folksy surroundings made it deeply appealing to deranged nationalism.  The open space in front of the theatre used to be called "Adolf Hitler Platz".  Of course, that name no longer features on any map, but the space has never been re-named, and so suffers from an uneasy anonymity.

Has Germany really come to terms with its past?  These days, the discourse around Nazism is deafening in its silence.  It was an attempt to confront that past that led to the Baader- Meinhof Gang, and (more productively) to much of the disturbing power in the drama of Heiner Müller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  Gerhard Richter (himself from Dresden) uses his art to tackle the deliberate suppression of memory in German culture.  Otherwise, all you see are a few ghosts - the little bronze plaques that mark the last sightings of German Jews in the streets of Berlin, the Jewish Museum, bizarre survivors like the Olympic Stadium.  Hellerau is full of ghosts - and to my mind it would be a much more powerful and evocative arts space if it were to embrace that, rather than rebuilding everything to a de-historicised, virginal blankness.  I would love to see it preserve the military "look", the imposing vastness of the square that threatens to become a car park, the peeling plaster on the outer walls of the former barracks walls.  In such a space of memory the wonderful progressive initiatives of the theatre - its Refugee Arts Centre, its Intercultural Garden - would acquire deeper meaning and resonance, being located in a continuum with history.  I can see it is uncomfortable to maintain that past - but it is actually what gives energy and hope to the present and the future.

Translations

I was still mulling these thoughts when I went to see Brian Friel's great play Translations at the National Theatre.  The reviews for this production have been adulatory, and justifiably so.  Translations remains one of the greatest plays about the process of colonisation - the way in which systems of oppression are established in the minds of the oppressed, partly by a discourse of superiority, but also by a wiping out of language, of history, and so of identity.  In my mind, it sat with Hellerau in a ying and yang relation - if oppression is made through the obliteration of folk memory, then might not that process be just as dangerous when applied to the oppressor?

The National's decision to present the play is laudable for precisely that reason.  It is the second time in recent years that a great post-colonial play, a theatre piece striking back against our country's imperial history, has been staged in the Olivier Theatre (the first was Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman).  I can see the reasoning - and yet somehow the vastness of the Olivier space, its sheer imperial bombast, its architecture of national arrogance, militated against the play's attitude of delicate resistance on a human scale.  Translations is set in a hedge school - a space that is theatrically powerful in relation to the invading army precisely because it is small and poor.  And the most effective response to the army does not come from anger or (offstage) violence, but through the cultural engagement followed by the schoolmaster Hugh and the emotional engagement of the "peasant" Máire.  It's one of the play's many provocative ironies that Máire views the English language, and her burgeoning love for the English Lieutenant Yolland as a means of potential escape into a "modern" world; while Yolland responds to the "authentic" and "natural" world that Ireland and Máire seem to present to him.  Their great scene of mutual comprehension and incomprehension - when Máire the "uneducated" switches from Irish to Latin in an attempt to communicate and the "educated" colonist doesn't even realise she has done so - is played with great delicacy and warmth; but I couldn't help feeling that its point was intimacy and physical proximity, and that the scale of the theatre was expressing almost exactly the political opposite of the play.

New Year Blog

Happy New Year everybody! I'm typing this on my new iMac - which will hopefully contribute to the development of Border Crossings over 2010 and beyond.

2009 has been an amazing year for the company - by far our busiest to date, and one which has clarified and defined our aims and identity for the future. For a start, there's a completely redesigned website, courtesy of Sam Hope-Evans at Phuture Design, with social networking and all that jazz! Now the iMac's in action, we should be able to get much more exciting content onto the web, with more videos to whet the appetite for performances, screenings, publications, workshops and talks.

The fact that I can list all of these things as Border Crossings activities is largely due to the Origins Festival of First Nations, which was the biggest single event in an amazing year. Just to present so much work in those two weeks was incredible - but what was even more exciting was the way in which the programme managed to lay down a coherent vision in terms of political, spiritual, artistic, social and environmental thought. All of which has shown its importance more and more as the year has gone on, with the Copenhagen summit rounding it off convincingly. If a gathering of world leaders, with the express purpose of slowing climate change, can be so dominated by petty economic self-interest as to fail to produce anything of any value whatsoever, then boy are we in trouble. We have got to start listening to ways of living on this planet which present alternatives to the power of the market - and First Nations offer them. So there will be more Origins Festivals: and in March I am off to New Zealand to start working on the next one.

On top of that, much of the year has been spent working on the development of Re-Orientations, the third part of the Trilogy, which we'll be presenting next autumn. I can truly say that February and August of 2009 were two of the most extraordinary, creative and open times I can ever remember - and I think the play, which we showed as work-in-progress in early September, more than proves the point. There's still a lot to do before we can perform them, but the foundations have been soundly laid. So look out in the autumn in Soho and Shanghai!

Outside of the company, it's also been a rich year culturally. In my freelance work, I've particularly enjoyed directing my first Brecht, The Good Soul of Szechuan, for Rose Bruford College, and beginning to write MA materials for the same academy - a job I'll be continuing in January. At the theatre, the highlights for me were Complicite's beautiful production with Japanese performers, Shun-kin at the Barbican; the Toneelgroep Amsterdam's six-hour epic Roman Tragedies at the same, ever-fertile address; and the National's staging of Wole Soyinka's classic Death and the King's Horseman - amazing just to see the play at last, and especially so well done.

In film, the London Film Festival was a highlight again, with Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah the star event. Obviously a film for a future Origins - unless it's had a huge general release first, which is far from impossible, given the awards it's harvesting! I've also read some great books - all of which inform my work, and the choice of which is of course informed by the work. So, in the early part of the year, I read Xinran's China Witness while in China - making its insights into the lives of older Chinese feel all the more immediate and all the more poignant. This also helped me think more deeply about the theme of Elders in the Origins Festival: the way in which First Nations value their older people so much more than we do in Western societies - and the social meaning of that value. So it was also very warming to spend a series of summer afternoons in the garden reading Seamus Heaney's book of interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll: Stepping Stones. Here is the quiet wisdom of one of our own Elders.

I've also spent quite a bit of time with David Mitchell, whose novels combine plot-lines and locations in ways which I find very helpful in thinking about our own devised work. I thought Ghostwritten, his first novel, of some years ago, was even better than Cloud Atlas: and experienced quite a shock while reading Black Swan Green, which at times felt uncomfortably like my own autobiography!

Have a great year, everyone....

Death and the King's Horseman

I'd known Wole Soyinka's masterpiece for a long time - written about it and workshopped scenes from it on various occasions. So I was genuinely excited finally to get the chance to see a full production at the National on Friday. The play's only been done once before in the UK, when Phyllida directed it in Manchester back in 1990 (!). In fact, I've only ever seen one other Soyinka play at all - which was The Lion and the Jewel at the Barbican a while ago. This is an altogether bigger piece, and it is brilliantly done at the National. Oddly, I'd not seen Rufus Norris's work before - but he has done this wonderfully. It's very funny and it's genuinely tragic.

One of the most interesting decisions is to have the white characters played by black actors, who are "whited up" on stage at the start of the performance. It's very similar to the effect in Almighty Voice and His Wife - where the ghosts are in white-face for the second half - you sense the conventions of a racist theatre being turned on their head by a post-colonial production. If the District Officer and his wife were played by white actors, then it's almost inevitable that, for all the absurdity of the characters, the predominantly white, middle-class audience at the National would end up identifying with them. Done like this, the whole play clearly emerges from the Yoruba viewpoint, so the two-dimensionality of the white characters becomes an advantage, and their absurd, sub-Coward language is the comic relief to the rich poetry of the Yoruba characters.

I keep remembering our own production of The Dilemma of a Ghost - which had a similar aesthetic, though a lower budget! The presence of Seun Shote in the cast makes the memory very tangible.

The Pitch Invasion

We performed at Leeds University last night. A really good gig for an African production: this is the department where Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan and Ngugi wa Thiongo studied. Jane Plastow, the Professor of African Theatre, is there, and so is her predecessor Martin Banham, looking like Father Christmas and smiling benignly over the proceedings. They are celebrating 40 years of the Workshop Theatre with this season of African drama, and Soyinka himself is coming next week to see their work on his Blackout and Beyond sketches. So we're definitely part of something!

Steve and the cast do a workshop with students, while Fiona and I sort out the lighting. The workshop involves teaching the Ghost song. At the end of the show, this has a spectacular effect, when huge numbers of students rush from their seats onto the stage to join the cast in song and dance. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this outside Africa. Prof positive that we've crossed real borders here!