Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, directed by Clare Preuss
New Harlem Productions with Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
November 21-December 3, 2017
Oba: “I’m a well that is drying up”
You know a play is in trouble if you have to read the programme to find out where it is set or what it is about. That is the case with the new play Cake by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard. A play has to be understandable on its own. Without reading the programme you would have no way of knowing that Cake was set in Niger or that it had to do with the open-pit mining of yellowcake uranium. The words “Niger”, “open-pit”, “mining”, “yellowcake”, “uranium” or even “cake” appear nowhere in the play. What the play presents instead is a vague neo-symbolist allegory about a man selling his country’s wealth. Though only 70 minutes long, the play becomes tedious and repetitive long before it ends.
Jackie Chau’s set provides little help in determining where the action is set. The presence of a rotary phone and a record player along with a collection of vinyl albums suggests it is sometime in the 1960’s or ‘70s. But what three oil drums are doing in what seems to be a living room and why there are three chairs wrapped up and hanging from the back wall remain a mystery.
The play concerns four characters – Oba (Jamie Robinson), Femi (Yolanda Bonnell), Mabo (Tsholo Khalema) and Aarif (Ash Knight). Oba, dressed in a suit and tie, sits in the leather chair centre stage and orders the sullen Femi about. She tells him her father told him to take care of her, but all he says is that he “acknowledges” her. Oba is some sort of businessman, who reads a Chinese newspaper and keeps jumping up to answer the phone that keeps ringing presumably to carry out business deals.
The main person with whom he does business is Aarif, a foreigner, who comes to buy packages of an unknown nature, wrapped in cloth and dredged up from one of the open oil drums by Femi. Aarif is noticeably attracted to Femi and even asks her out on a date, which Oba permits, even though he tries to keep the two separate whenever they are both in his house. After the date, Aarif gives Femi money, but she gives it to Oba.
Who Mabo is is unclear. He is impressed by Oba and also likes Femi. He makes carvings for Oba that Oba only pretends to enjoy. Oba sells these carvings for Mabo and keeps a “handling fee” for doing so. Otherwise, he lets Mabo sell any junk Mabo finds around the house. Mabo tells the audience the same folktale three times. It concerns a puffed-up Lizard, who given Mabo’s nod to Oba must represent Oba, and Spider, who we presume represents Mabo. The two fight a duel three times and each time Spider climbs on Lizard’s back. The judges declare no winner, but Spider feels he has won because at least he didn’t lose. In the third telling of the tale, Mabo adds new material about Hawk and Dove, but this obscures rather than clarifies what has gone before.
St. Bernard merely repeats the same actions of the four with variations until, for unknown reasons, Oba cannot fulfil a business promise, we hear crashing sounds and the play ends. Mostly because of Mabo’s folktale, we come to think the show is some sort of allegory. We hear from Femi that she taught Oba’s father stories. She thus could symbolize the land that business is abusing to make money, money that goes to foreigners but not his own people. A direct relationship between Femi and Aarif is undesirable because that cuts out Oba’s role and only source of power as the middleman. The fact that Aarif gives Femi money after their “date” suggests that Oba is prostituting the country he was meant to care for. As for cultural products like those that Mabo makes, Oba has no interest except for the paltry amount of money they make.
Once we have have figured out the allegory’s general scheme after the show’s numerous repetitions of the same sequence of events, there is nothing more to discover, yet the play keeps on going the same way until it quite outstays its welcome.
One of many problems with the play is that St. Bernard’s allegory is so general it could apply to any country that sells its natural resources to foreigners, including Canada, and is hardly specific to Niger. Second, it is a romantic notion to make Femi somehow represent the spirit of the land since Niger has been a country only since 1900 when the French carved it out from other countries. Niger has no national identity since its land belonged to four other nations before 1900 and the people who live there identify more with the transborder tribes they represent than with the artificially created country of Niger.
Dramatically, there are far too many anomalies that go unexplained. Twice Femi plays the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Jacques Brel on the record player. Oba doesn’t like it. So, does this mean that Femi doesn’t want Oba to leave her even though he treats her badly or that Oba does like it that he is responsible for Femi, or what? Why, when Aarif pays for his second packet of whatever does he not take it with him as he did the first? Why does Oba pretend to be friendly to Mabo, when he doesn’t care about his art and even throws it away? Why when food is “delivered” to Oba’s house, does it mean Oba has to reach out and take what looks like a metal clamshell mess kit off the wall that has almost nothing in it?
The actors do well at playing their symbolic parts even if they cannot be called characters. Jamie Robinson tries especially hard to make Oba’s plight compelling even though St. Bernard gives us no indication of what the nature of his plight is. Moba is the only figure who approaches being a character, mostly because it is difficult to know what exactly he is meant to symbolize. This does mean that Tsholo Khalema is the only actor who succeeds in making any connection with the audience.
It is pretty much the opposite function of an allegorical play to keep its meaning hidden from the audience. Allegories are meant to explain a situation not conceal it. Cake explains nothing and the little meaning we can derive from it is too general even to be considered interesting.
Apparently, St. Bernard has a plan to write a pentacontatetralogy about Africa with one play dedicated to each of the continent’s 54 countries. This seems a misguided effort. Imagine if a Canadian with a European heritage decided to write one play about each of the countries of Europe. How exactly could one 70-minute-long play be said to sum up the nature of a countries like the UK, Greece, German, France, Russia or Spain? A person would consider such a project both naive and hubristic. It is no different with the countries of Africa where people have lived for an even greater time. And indeed what is a country? Is it what is a country now or in 1950 or 1900 or 1850 or 1800? In Europe the number of countries changes from each of those time points to the next. The same is true in Africa. Many borders that define countries around the world are artificial. What is more important, peoples or borders?
The best way to learn about the countries of Africa is from plays written by the people who grew up there like Tawfik al-Hakim’s The Fate of a Cockroach (1966) about Egypt, Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”...and the Boys (1982) about South Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina’s Shine Your Eye (2010) about Nigeria or Tawiah M’carthy’s Obaaberima (2012) about Ghana. I would much rather see a play based on the author’s personal experience of a place rather than an allegory so vague and unclear it says nothing about any particular country.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Ash Knight, Jamie Robinson, Yolanda Bonnell and Tsholo Khalema; Yolanda Bonnell and Jamie Robinson. ©2017 Graham Isador.
For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.
2017-11-22
Cake