 |
| Patrice Lumumba c1960 |
Aimé Césaire’s 1966 anti-colonial play about Congolese independence from Belgium in 1960 was rather a hagiography of Patrice Lumumba. A humanist, idealist and former beer salesman, Lumumba was briefly the Congo's first Prime Minister, before being butchered only a year into office by Katangan secessionists in league with his successor Mobutu.
Playwright Césaire was a Paris-based Martinican who wrote in French and astonishingly this Young Vic production was billed as the British premiere of his work, in a translation by Ralph Manheim. It was also the theatrical debut for cinema director Joe Wright (of ‘Atonement’ fame), who came onto the stage with the cast for this final show in the run to a rapturous reception from the audience.
 |
| General Mobutu Sese Seko |
This was energized physical theatre and the passionate Malcolm-X-style performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor (star of TV’s ‘Dancing on the Edge’) partly compensated for an intermittently over-rhetorical script. Amongst the (all-black) other players, Daniel Kaluuya effectively captured Mobutu’s transition from sidekick to thuggish coup leader, while Joseph Mydell was a benign President Kasavubu, who inadvertently paved the way to Mobutu’s 32 year disastrous kleptomaniac reign.
 |
| Playwright Aime Cesaire |
Surreal Brechtian-style puppet heads brandishing US and Soviet flags were combined with actors wearing prosthetic white noses to symbolise the malign impact of Belgian bankers and external Cold War rivalries on events in the Congo. All the familiar tropes of 'Africa-through-Western-eyes' were thrown into the mix: pumped-up beret-wearing hoodlums wielding machine guns like penis-extensions, a shaman chattering in a tribal language, steamy tropical brothels with slinky batik-clad whores and heavily sexualised drumbeats (from DRC Music’s ‘Kinshasa One Two’).
Comparing it with Lynn Nottage’s more restrained ‘Ruined’ at the Almeida in 2010 (which focused on the end of Mobutu's rule), you might conclude that, for all the show's gusto and the ecstatic audience response, more might have been achieved with less.
