Sixty years of forgotten treasures

Britain is to get a Black Theatre Archive. Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah relives his role in its creation

In Britain, my work is almost exclusively compared to that of Roy Williams. This has always enraged me. Roy is a fine, prolific writer; but even if we were to be compared on the most obvious grounds – race – we still write out of two very different black traditions. I am terribly influenced by the African-American canon and stand on the shoulders of playwrights such as Edgar White, whereas Roy’s work has echoes of Caryl Phillips. And Roy, I would argue, takes inspiration from sources closer to home. What amazed me was that US critics seemed to get that. Although they weren’t always complimentary, to me that was secondary: what was important was that here was intelligent, detailed analysis and context.

Sixty years of forgotten treasures | Kwame Kwei-Armah | Stage | The Guardian

Image from Zecora Ura's 2006 adaptation of The Tempest

This year, Ringplay is working on a similar adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Widely understood to be Shakespeare’s swan song, the original play tells the story of Prospero, the scholar-magician who loses his dukedom to his more ambitious brother, and who, after being exiled from his home, winds up on an island whose chief inhabitants are a legion of spirits, and Caliban, one creature who takes some kind of human form. Prospero settles on the island with his daughter Miranda, and he raises her, and tries to tame the wild being he meets there. The Tempest of the title refers to the magical hurricane Prospero conjures up to shipwreck his brother and the king who had assisted the overthrow, and the play unfolds under Prospero’s power.

In Shakespeare’s original, Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, his brother Antonio is the usurper, and Alonso is the medieval King of Naples, Antonio’s ally and backer. In the Ringplay adaptation, the kingdoms are twenty-first century hotel conglomerates; Alonso is a woman, and the stakes are the control of Prosperity Cay, an island in The Bahamas where the two great companies, Naples-America and Hotel Milan, hope perhaps to build their next great joint resort. The sea they are crossing is the Bahamian branch of the Atlantic, the spirits are local deities, and Ariel the head spirit takes on forms that include a chickcharney.

The Tempest is a play that’s full of illusion and spectacle. Nothing in the play is as it appears to be. Caliban is written as an uncultured brute, but he has the most beautiful language in the entire play; Ariel, on the other hand, is reduced to singing some of the silliest songs ever penned for the stage. Prospero forces his enemies to feel loss and remorse, and in the end forgives them; he creates the best circumstances he can for his daughter to fall in love, and then forbids her to exercise her feelings; and in the end he sets all the spirits free, renounces his art, and turns away from his island to take up the reins of industry once again.

The Tempest goes into rehearsal on August 10th, and will be performed for school audiences and for the general public during Shakespeare in Paradise between 5th and 12th October 2009. Make plans now to see it — the thing about plays is that once they close, there’s no guarantee they’ll be mounted again!

Running the auditions was our guest director Craig Pinder, a Bahamian actor whose career on London’s West End includes featured performances in Les Misérables and Mamma Mia! as well as numerous productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Craig’s co-directing the production of The Tempest along with Trini director Patti-Anne Ali, and in conjunction with Nicolette Bethel and Philip A. Burrows of Ringplay Productions and Shakespeare in Paradise. He’s also playing the part of Prospero in the production.

The auditions were held at The Hub, East Bay Street, and got a turnout of some 18 people, some of whom were trained actors, others who were raw talents, and we had some really happy surprises. The problem isn’t whether we have enough talent for The Tempest now — it’s how we can use the talent we have.

Check back for photographs of the auditions, taken by David Burrows!

The first auditions for The Tempest by William Shakespeare, adapted and dramaturged for a Bahamian setting by Nicolette Bethel, Travis Cartwright-Carroll, Reva Sharma, and Toni Francis, will be held tomorrow, Saturday, August 1st.

The Tempest is the signature piece of this year’s Shakespeare in Paradise theatre festival (October 5th – 12th, 2009).

Auditions will be held on Saturday, August 1st beginning at 11:00 am at The Hub, Bay Street and Colebrook Lane.

The parts that are available can be found here.

Information about the directors of this production can be found here.

You are asked to come with a prepared piece of no more than two minutes in length. You will also be asked to read either a monologue or a part of a scene from the play.

You can download those pieces here.

Future auditions will take place for Music of The Bahamas and we will post that information as soon as it becomes available.

If you have any questions you can email us at admin@shakespeareinparadise.org ]]> http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/07/31/the-tempest-goes-into-production/feed/ 0 http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2008/09/12/the-wrecking-ball-new-political-theatre/ http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2008/09/12/the-wrecking-ball-new-political-theatre/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:49:45 +0000 Nico http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2008/09/12/the-wrecking-ball-new-political-theatre/ This site’s worth watching.

What’s especially worth watching is the piece that is currently the second one on the page (which doesn’t appear to work the way blogs usually work, so prepare to scroll) – “An open letter to Prime Minister Harper From Wajdi Mouawad, Governor General Award-winning Canadian playwright; Knight of the Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres, France; Artistic Director of French Theatre, The National Arts Centre of Canada”.

Here’s one good bit:

Last week, your government reaffirmed its manner of governing unilaterally, this time on a domestic issue, in bringing about reductions in granting programs destined for the cultural sector. A mere matter of budgeting, you say, but one which sends shock waves throughout the cultural milieu –rightly or wrongly, as we shall see- for being seen as an expression of your contempt for that sector. The confusion with which your Ministers tried to justify those reductions and their refusal to make public the reports on the eliminated programs, only served to confirm the symbolic significance of that contempt. You have just declared war on the artists.

Now, as one functionary to another, this is the second thing that I wanted to tell you: no government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one. One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics.

And here’s another:

Art and politics both hate and envy one another; since time immemorial, they detest each other and they are mutually attracted, and it’s through this dynamic that many a political idea has been born; it is in this dynamic that sometimes, great works of art see the light of day. Your cultural politics, it must be said, provoke only a profound consternation. Neither hate nor detestation, not envy nor attraction, nothing but numbness before the oppressive vacuum that drives your policies.

This vacuum which lies between you and the artists of Canada, from a symbolic point of view, signifies that your government, for however long it lasts, will not witness either the birth of a political idea or a masterwork, so firm is your apparent belief in the unworthiness of that for which you show contempt. Contempt is a subterranean sentiment, being a mix of unassimilated jealousy and fear towards that which we despise. Such governments have existed, but not lasted because even the most detestable of governments cannot endure if it hasn’t the courage to affirm what it actually is.

Go read the whole thing:

The Wrecking Ball | New Political Theatre.

Queen’s College, Georgetown

QC Auditorium from the outside

Queen’s College, we were told, is the second best school in Guyana, the best being the Anna Regina Multilateral School in Essequibo.  The thing is, though (we were told) Queen’s College attracts the best students, because it’s a day school, it’s in Georgetown, and children can live with their parents.  Anna Regina is a boarding school and is up the Atlantic Coast at the mouth of the Essequibo River.  That being said, Queen’s College has an auditorium with a lot of seating capacity and a great big stage.  As a result, the QC Auditorium was the main staging site for The Children’s Teeth in Georgetown.

A view of the sound equipment, at the back of the hall, with a bit of the hall included

When we arrived there, we had to build the set.  It was raining that morning, pouring down, and the auditorium has a tin roof that leaks sometimes.  We got there, picked our way through the mud outside, and began working on the set.  The stage was big, bigger than the Dundas stage, but had no backstage or dressing rooms.  Someone had set up a tent outside (shades of the Centre for the Performing Arts) for a backstage, but the rain had battered that to the earth and the ground underneath it was soggy and impossible to use.  So Philip and Terrance set about creating a backstage using the set itself.

A view of the stage before the set was built

The first thing they did was reassemble the set.  It made it, having been rescued from the container and having been sent on the cargo plane, and Terrance and Philip and I arrived at QC at 8:00 (a.m.) to begin building it.  The morning was wet — underwater, I said on Blogworld — with intermittent heavy rain.  The roof of the auditorium is corrugated iron, so that when the rain fell heavily it was deafening, so as Philip built the set he muttered that if it rained that night the show would not go on.  A little rain wouldn’t hurt — the play takes place in August rainstorms, and the roof of the house in question is leaking — but a lot would make it impossible for the actors to be heard.  

Below are shots of the set being assembled.

Terrance putting the house together, with the auditorium in the background

Philip and Terrance put the walls together

The rain stopped by mid-morning, leaving mud and a soggy ground behind.  Georgetown, I learned later, is below sea level, and is surrounded by rivers — the Demerara to the west and the Berbice to the east.  Its fertility — so good for growing sugar cane, hence the rum and the Demerara Gold sugar (the real thing is so much better than the fake, reprocessed, molasses-infused variety) — comes from being on a river delta (New Orleans comes to mind) but the ground is boggy, and water is never very far away.  Every parcel of land is surrounded by ditches, drainage to keep the land dry and the water where it’s wanted.  Even the auditorium at QC is surrounded by a drainage gutter, which would be fine if the rain hadn’t fallen all day long.

View of the grounds through the stage door

The set was finished by midday, when the sun came out and shone weakly — thankfully, otherwise the hall would get too hot — and I went out and picked up a quick lunch for myself and the set builders.  The cast arrived at 2 for their first rehearsal on the set.  The afternoon heated up, but the rain held off, and the run-through took place in steamy heat.  The technicians arrived around 2 as well, and set up the lighting system — two trees with two lights each, and a spot high up on each side platform, run by a lights-up-lights-down board (fading was possible but caused feedback with the sound system, so was used sparingly) — and the sound system — a CD player, a mixer, and a couple of free-standing speakers.  I ran the lights from the script in the computer, and didn’t actually run them until the evening came.

Running the lights from the computer script

There were no dressing rooms, only a bathroom that was part of the school and auditorium complex, and while there was decent water pressure earlier in the day, it faded in the evening to a mere trickle that dripped onto fingers and took forever to refill toilet tanks.

But the audience came out nevertheless.  The night was hot, and Derek Walcott was speaking elsewhere, and we were in a high school auditorium, but the Guyanese people came out to the play.  And the hall was so live that it was hard to understand what people said — especially those people whose voices are already big, like Kennedy or who are so very natural on stage that all their words slurred into one another by the echo, like Leah and Dion — but the people came out to the play, and they got it.  And the next night, even more people came, and were moved, some of them, to tears by the play.  Guyana TV filmed it and replayed it during CARIFESTA, and the producer interviewed us as well.

 All in all?  The experience was an excellent one.