Brett Bailey’s story of dictator Idi Amin is a blend of modish Western and venerable African aesthetics
Theatre
Guy Willoughby
Big Dada: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin Dada is play-maker (writer-director seems too cramping) Brett Bailey’s fourth big stage excursion into the weird, palpitating nexus of history and myth that makes story-telling in Africa so hugely enjoyable and frustrating.
In cultures so resolutely oral as ours, with history being ceaselessly overheard, cut, chopped and changed in the mouths and ears of its participants, it’s no wonder that a postmodern tale-teller like Bailey finds Africa so congenial a source of storyboard. What is the “truth” about King Hintsa’s head? Or Nonquase the prophetess?
Bailey and his busy, many-headed cast don’t know, or say: this is theatre as heart-wrenching spectacle, not head-banging debating chamber. Meanwhile, the magic of these stage events insist we leave with searing images, ringing phrases and snatches of meaning: a sense of the provisionality of “truth”, ever-changing on the tongues of those who speak it.
This quirky blend of modish Western and venerable African aesthetics has worked remarkably well for Bailey to date, in Ipi Zombi, Mumbo Jumbo, and The Prophet. Now, in Big Dada, the play-maker pushes his own boundaries in disturbing ways. Firstly, the story of Idi Amin Dada, post-colonial Africa’s most notorious tyrant-cum-buffoon, has an urgent topicality absent in Bailey’s earlier shows.
A stage interpretation of such blood-soaked recent history (Amin ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1978) must take account of complex intellectual issues: African dictatorship, Western collusion, theories and practices of politics on this continent.
Unlike fellow playwright Wole Soyinka, intriguingly at work in Nigeria right now on a fictitious study of dictatorship called King Baabaa, Bailey deals avowedly with fact with “the rise and fall of Idi Amin Dada” (his play’s sub-title), a very specific tyrant.
How, then, to proceed? Firstly, Bailey invites the audience’s critical distance by placing the drama behind the proscenium arch, taking it off the floor on which he once daringly mingled actors and audience in a breathless, volatile continuum. Putting the actors on a conventional stage (even at the supposedly ironic remove of a play within a play) prompts us into tougher intellectual scrutiny than before of what we are witnessing.
Moreover, instead of indigenous styles of ritual however playful, altered or ironised Bailey’s mode of storytelling is a kind of cartoon-book cabaret. Amin’s harrowing history of murder, pillage and paranoia collapses into a series of stagey song-and-dance routines, most of a glorious, noisy theatricality and surprising nature, but allowing no space for quieter interrogation of political issues.
In the various routines, Bailey and his seething, agile, extraordinary players are at their best rendering the various episodes of Amin’s steady descent from national saviour to ghoulish butcher (literally) in fabulous, dynamic, show-stopping images, driven by the crazily catchy rhythms of Bood Carver and Douglas Armstrong’s music.
The performances are breathtaking, a tribute to Bailey’s intense, communal brand of play-making: Sello Sebotsane, as the bizarre, delusional, somehow affectingly crazed Ugandan Life President, gives a towering performance at once larger than life and pathetically human. Other stand-out players include the protean, pint-sized Aby Xakwe, the brooding Odidi Mfenyana and the vocal pyrotechnics of Mntungwa Khumalo.
Yet there is an intellectual fuzziness here, because for all the richness and variety of spectacle we are left with niggling, unpalatable questions not subsumed, as previously, by the truth-is-provisional aesthetic.
What, precisely, do we learn about the historic Big Dada we did not know? How is our understanding of the ideological and economic forces at work in post-colonial Africa, that gave rise to a phenomenon like Amin, advanced?
I would argue that they are not, for the reason that cartoon-book cabaret gives us history in broad two-dimensional outline. With the insistent cruelty and horror of Amin’s record urging itself upon us, it is hard to leave the play as we do here with the abiding notion that his fellow citizens and subjects were somehow dupes. This is not in itself a very convincing political argument.
At the show’s end Big Dada overwhelms with the sheer fecundity of its invention, and the irresistible sense we have of feasting on the mythic, imagistic richness of Africa. I defy anyone to be untouched by the Third World Bunfight company’s magical I use the word advisedly recasting of theatrical modes, and for this reason the show deserves big audiences.
But Bailey has reached the limits of his chosen aesthetic: next time, if he is to avoid merest caricature he needs to get back to the basics of what he is trying to do in the theatre. There is more to the stage than spectacle and much more to Africa too.
The details
Big Dada: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin Dada is showing at the Baxter Theatre Centre’s Main Theatre until August 18. Book at Computicket or Tel: (021) 685 7880.