Aimé Césaire’s play about the life and
death of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, was written only five years after his 1961
assassination. It has taken this long to receive its English-language
première, for which the selling points have been not Césaire and
Lumumba but actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in the principal role and acclaimed
film director Joe Wright making his second foray into stage work. As
his début,
Trelawny Of The “Wells”
a few months ago at the Donmar, showed Wright’s ease with the
performance idioms of Victorian melodrama but also a tendency to take
them too far into caricature, so this project demonstrates that he is
well acquainted with Brechtian epic, physical theatre, agitprop and
several other dramatic registers, but once again fails to fit them
snugly together.
The evening contains a number of telling touches from the major to the
almost throwaway. The Brechtian idea of distanciated commentary is
wonderfully fulfilled by having musician Kabongo Tshisensa step forward
periodically for brief griot-like orations, translated by other cast
members. And a wonderfully economic emblem of the death of Lumumba’s
vision of an independent, democratic Congo comes in the final minute,
when Daniel Kaluuya as Joseph Mobutu replaces his peaked military cap
with the leopard-skin toque which was to become Mobutu’s trademark
through his thirty-plus years of dictatorship. Ejiofor does not shy
away from the contradictions in Césaire’s account of Lumumba, who comes
across as principled and passionate yet often a crucial step behind
events and finally, fatally too preoccupied with protocols of
“legitimacy” (in a rhetoric familiar to me from the serial IRA splits
during my Northern Irish youth).
The play serves as a sharp indictment of colonialism both old and neo-,
with the Belgian imperial masters and American hegemons alike covertly
frustrating Lumumba’s attempts to stave off the secession of
mineral-rich Katanga province and the UN passing resolutions but
failing to be resolute. Many supporting performers appear in costumes
more contemporary than period, underlining that the same tensions and
fragmentation afflict the DRC today. Scenes are interspersed with dance
sequences (choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui takes a co-director
credit) which may symbolise the same, or may impressionistically
recapitulate the dramatic action, but to be frank mostly just drag
matters out to no good effect. Lumumba certainly deserves to be
remembered more widely, but also rather more coherently than in this
realisation.
Written for the Financial
Times.