The spectacle of the World Summit seems to dwarf the footling efforts of mere artists. But the power of theatre was vividly demonstrated in Cape Town last week when Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka previewed King Baabu, his new play.
At a press conference Soyinka revealed that this well-travelled international production was blocked from appearance at the summit — by the same European country, Switzerland, whose funding agencies were responsible for two-thirds of its budget.
In a curious spin of the post-colonial dialectic, the Swiss ambassador to South Africa, Rudolf Schaller, pulled the plug: “He thought that the play abused the Nigerian government,” said Soyinka drily. “Unless their permission was obtained, he maintained King Baabu should not be mounted.”
The play’s Swiss producer Nicholas Propp added: “Getting their permission would’ve held us up for months; so the play was simply put off.”
This bizarre genuflection to the unreasoning resistance of Africa’s leaders to criticism, even of the most oblique theatrical kind, is an ironic tribute to the force of writer-director Soyinka’s arresting new drama.
The play toured Nigeria last year — “it was so enthusiastically received under the newly liberalised government,” says Propp, “that even the governor of Lagos came and bought stacks of tickets” — before playing to critical and popular acclaim in Germany and Switzerland.
An hilarious, explosive and thoroughly African reworking of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) — itself a manic rewrite of Shakespeare’s Macbeth — King Baabu hurls audiences pell-mell into this continent’s most insistent political dilemma: why does power so often end up in the hands of grotesque dictators, motivated solely by what Soyinka calls “the lust for power”?
King Baabu — the name a scrambled echo of the late Nigerian military ruler, General Sanni Abacha — tracks with wit and irony the psychic twists and turns whereby ordinary individuals get caught up in the seductive trap of power.
The play follows the career of a goatherd-turned-soldier (played with ebullient, horrific charm by British actor Yomi A Michaels), who — spurred on, Macbeth-style, by his ruthlessly ambitious wife, Maariya (Susan Aderin) — becomes head of state, then king, in a mythical African country. In Soyinka’s skilful hands, the rich, seething actuality of contemporary African society, with its competing forces — traditional, progressive, military, religious — comes sharply, hilariously to life.
Surrounded by toadies and cheer-leaders, it’s all too easy for Baabu to believe in his omnipotence — that, like tyrants since the start of time, he has a mystical mission to lead. One of the richest aspects of Soyinka’s satire is the play’s insistence that ideologies are the first target of authoritarianism, African style: “Instead of social governance at the will of the people,” the playwright remarked, “leaders twist prevailing belief systems for their own purpose. Forgetting ordinary people’s crucial role in previous anti-colonial liberation struggles, rulers become adept at adapting ‘progressive’ ideologies. The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of me!”
With dictatorship and demagogery all too alive and well in Africa –Soyinka referred with a sigh to “the one rampaging in Zimbabwe right now, playing the race card as an opportunistic solution to the very real land issue” — it’s illuminating to read King Baabu in the context of a series of similarly spectacle-driven local dramas that interrogate the miseries of African politics.
Local writer-director Brett Bailey’s retelling of Idi Amin’s rise and fall, Big Dada, offered blood-soaked spectacle, and sheer unreason, in the face of tyranny.
Soyinka is more subtle, because more girded with intellectual substructure; whereas ordinary people are merely dupes in Bailey’s schema, in King Baabu their insistent objections have to be constantly cajoled, negotiated, bought off.
Frustrated but stoical about missing the opportunity of playing the World Summit — “wherever any African leaders are gathered, I wish my play were in the midst of them” — Africa’s laureate wishes to play the entire continent “if any angels can come forward as sponsors”.
Meanwhile, King Baabu opens later this month in Pretoria, “where at least the issues of the summit will be in the air,” says Propp; it then becomes the first overseas stage production to play Lesotho, which as Soyinka points out “has its own recent history of military rule”.
Soyinka admits that if he were solely involved in political protest theatre “I’d be ready for a lunatic asylum by now”, and — fond lover of his craft as he is — he admits quixotically to an age-old artist’s dream. “The real solution to dictatorship will only be achieved when artists become politicans.”
But there is no reason to believe artists are somehow immune to corruption. As Bailey observed: “Hitler was a painter” — and we all know how dangerous, ultimately, his aesthetic designs proved to be.
The details
King Baabu shows at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until September 7; in Pretoria at the State Theatre from September 10 to 14; at the Maseru Convention Centre from September 17 to 20.