What a difference Broadband makes. Wordsbody's enabled and back in the groove - apologies for the long absence. Here are images of the 50-strong crew of Fela The Musical! arriving at Murtala Muhammed Airport. Fela! in Lagos is at Eko Hotel Expo Hall next week, from April 20 to 25.
Fela! The Musical is finally coming home. The hit Broadway musical about the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a critical and commercial success in New York and later London, where it was sold-out for three months and got nominated for three Olivier Awards (having won 3 Tonys in the US).
Satirical Comedy Play
Written by Tayo Aluko"Paul Robeson was one of the greatest actors, singers and civil rights campaigners of the 20th century. When over the years he gets progressively too radical and outspoken for the establishment' s liking, he is branded a traitor to his country, harassed, and denied opportunities to perform or travel.
Just as physical, emotional and mental stress threaten to push him over the fine line between genius and madness, he is summoned to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, to give the most difficult and important performance of his career.
The play is a roller coaster journey through Robeson's remarkable and eventful life, and highlights how his radical activism caused him to be disowned and dis-remembered, even by the leaders and descendants of the civil rights movement. It features some of his famous songs and speeches, including a dramatic rendition of Ol' Man River."
Dates: Thursday, 20th November & Friday, 21st November
Venue: Oxford House Theatre
Derbyshire Street
London E2 6HG
Times 7.30pm
Tickets: £12 waged/£10 unwaged.
Bookings & info: 020 8983 9671 or 07950 735 390.
Plays on until 5 October
JG
19 March 2008
Excerpt from Toyin Akinosho's Artsville column of yesterday... 
y Ahmed Yerima: Yemoja (October 21) and The Twist (October 28). Theatre At Terra grew out of Oguntokun's Season Of Soyinka's Plays, a one off series of live drama performances over four weekends at Terra Kulture last August. At the end of the well-attended Season, produced in commemoration of the Nobel Laureate's 73rd birthday, the collaborators realised they had hit upon a do-able project. There are thousands of Nigerian plays all over the place; why not take one each every weekend and breathe life into it? Terra Kulture has always been considered a smart place to hang out, especially by the Lagos Peppersoup Elite (roughly defined as the species of middle class Nigerians who earn 150,000 plus a month and can afford to travel for holidays once a year). So, getting an audience to fill the 100 seats in the auditorium for N2,000 each has not been extraordinarily difficult. Even so, to put quality work on stage requires more than the N200,000 guaranteed by a full hall." The first in this month's Theatre@ Terra 'A Gathering of Eagles' productions, Femi Osofisan's The Engagement (directed by Sunkanmi Adebayo), was performed yesterday @ Terra Kulture, Tiamiyu Savage Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.
Coming highlights this month
Broken Walls is a new play by Wole Oguntokun. In a collaborative production with the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital (Yaba Psychiatric Hospital) , there will be a performance at the Agip Recital Hall of the Muson Centre, Onikan-Lagos on Sunday the 13th of May.
Written & directed by Oguntokun, Broken Walls explores the travails of the mentally ill, and the effects on their families and community.
MW: I have read Kwame Kwei-Armah's & Hugh Quarshie (who has played Othello before, I believe)'s thoughts on this matter before. Reminds me of a review I wrote of a production of Othello at the Trafalgar Studios in London back in 2004 in which I also touched on Quarshie's essay (I'll see if I can dig out my review). The production starrred Nsello Maake Ka Ncube as Othello; see a poem I wrote about meeting his eyes during the performance, as one of only 2 0r 3 black people in an audience of 300 or 400.
The saving grace, if you could call it that, was that Anthony Sher's Iago was a Heil Hitler type sniggering over-the-top character you cannot identify with at all, whatever your race; problem is, Shakepeare intended that you dislike Iago, so nothing really new there. The setting was moved to something like second World War Venice; a few of the other minor characters were played by blacks actors. Still, this overiding question of race was overwhelming in the production, for me. And if you were to cut out stuff like: "These moors are changeable in their wills" or references to the "black ram tupping your white ewe" - you would not have the play Othello. I actually love this play, for the very reason that it is not just a great tragedy, but also because it discomfits me and discomfits the person next to me.
What I feel is that, the racial connotations of Othello changes depending on (1) where it is staged; (2) the racial composition of the actors; and (3) the composition of the audience. If you had a production of Othello in Lagos with Nigerian actors playing to a Nigerian audience, the emphasis on character rather than race as suggested by Quarshie, would come to the fore. Any other way, it remains problematic. And you can't have a white (un-blacked out) actor play him because Othello is necessarily black ("Happily, for I am black").
A black actor playing Othello in a largely white cast to a largely white audience may unwittingly validate racial stereotypes. But I am of the view that it is a darn sight better than Laurence Olivier "blacking up" to play Othello, something that was once the norm. And since Shakespeare himself wrote the part for a white actor, the very notion of a black actor taking over the role is a subversion of sorts, and that pleases me. And when we think about it, some great black cultural icons (Paul Robeson, no less) have played Othello. Quarshie himself shows from his essay that he had ruminated so much about the role that (though I never saw the production that featured him) one cannot doubt that he approached the part with a great sense of responsibility. What is needed, are talented black actors with the presence of mind and self awareness to help them transcend the stereotypes.
We must carry on seeing productions of Othello, because I see shades of the moor and the societal factors that made and broke him, all around us everyday. Quarshie's examples of Dodi Fayed and O J Simpson (him especially; who lived in a white world only to embrace his blackness on a rap for the gruesome murder of his wife, someone that was a consuming passion to him - poor Nicole, God rest her) were on the ball, and I noted this in my review. I added to Quarshie's list a black boxer (I hesitate to name him still) who wasn't such a good pugilist but was adored by the British public because he was (maybe still is) the kind of black man that made whites comfortable, reinforced their sense of racial superiority. He wasn't clever, he knew his place, he made black people cringe in their seats (Caribbean or African, I am yet to meet a black person who was proud of this guy even in his glory days). The boxer was greatly rewarded for his modest talents when better black British boxers didn't fare so well. Crucially, he had a white wife. Since he's been divorced, the facade seems to have been blown and the boxer is now just a pathetic loser, though rich. So there you have it.
Othello is all around us. Long live the play, "flawed" though it is.
~ * ~ * ~
TC: Though I'd assent to some judicious editing of the play's text (it's controversial but, like Quarshie, I don't believe in being enslaved to the text--and how many people do full length Hamlets anyway?), I also hav to say a black actor in the troubling role is a damn sight better than Lord Buttermelt done up in blackface.
Blackface is its own thing, full of rotten history, impermissible to anyone except, perhaps, to teenage Japanese girls who are so far off the kooky scale they aren't any of our business.
See...
Your poem of Nsello reminds me, Molara, of one time I went to see Seamus Heaney give a talk in New York. The audience was large, but only two of us had the touch of the tar-brush, just me and another, older, man.
Five minutes before the event started, I was in my seat. The room was almost full. That was when two white women walked across the room and said to me, "Could you please do something about the air-conditioning." Wit failed. And all I could say in response was a prosaic, "I'm here for the poems, too" and thank the gods these fools hadn't approached Derek Walcott instead.
~ * ~ * ~
MW: "Could you please do something about the air-conditioning"?!
What a cheek! I'd have to say they're a lot more polite and reserved in England, to say such.
Derek Walcott, ehn? You were in esteemed company, mai broda.
An English colleague who worships black Jazz gods told me he's noticed some serene sense of joy that shows upon the bearing of black jazz musicians when they spot their kind in the crowd during concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall or such places, since the audience is mostly white for these shows. I admire white audiences for turning up purely for the love of the arts (they turn up for Malian & Yoruba musicians too and clearly enjoy themselves, even as they don't understand the lyrics). There's been a slight increase in black attendance for Nigerian/African artists in recent years - but I remain baffled as to why blacks generally stay away.
As someone who goes to art events a lot here in London, one regularly feels like an endangered specie in the audience, especially in the theatre (must be even worse at the opera, though I must confess I'm as guilty as the next woman when it comes to opera!). Your skin colour suddenly becomes so magnified. You wear it loose on you, like an oversized cross. And it's so lonely. Then think how it is for the black player who can't find anyone he/she can identify with in the audience.
Much as any player loves to play to all of God's children, it helps sometimes if you can get that specific identification allowed by your kind. That was what happened when Nsello saw me in that audience. The loneliness of the black in Elizabethan period Venice was in that theatre filled with white people in 2004. I felt some racial angst. It wasn't just about Othello anymore; it was about me too.
That's what I love about theatre. The danger.
Nollywood star Stella Damasus-Aboderin stars 
Written by John Kani and starring the man himself, Nothing But The Truth is at the Hampstead Theatre, London, until 24 February.
It's been performed in Lagos and now it comes to Abuja. Odia Ofeimun's dance drama, A Feast of Return - is at the National Centre For Women Development in Abuja on February 15, 16 & 17 2007.
Wole Oguntokun is in the directorial mode again on Boxing Day. He directs Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers - as part of the Jasonvision Legend Series.
A Feast of Return
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