Moser Theatre, Wadham, Mon 11th May - Fri 15th May 2009

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Rowena Purrett May 11, 2009

The Servant’s Ball Blitzkrieg is described on the programme as a “postcolonial extravaganza” and it certainly is that. The production is based on two plays; The Servant’s Ball, and Blitzkrieg both written by Dambudzo Marechera. It focuses on the inter-racial weaving of the Zimbabwean people and the issues that go along with it, a topic that is still highly relevant today. The Servant’s Ball Blitzkrieg is accompanied throughout by a live musical section and action which fluctuates between Granny Beri’s “Shebeen” and the goings-on at the house of Comrade Norman Drake.

The ambitious blending of the two plays causes the production to be somewhat inscrutable; an aspect not helped by the fact that most cast members are playing two characters (sometimes of a different sex and/or race!) whose identity is not always altogether clear to the audience. However, the professionalism of the cast and their commitment to The Servant’s Ball Blitzkrieg serves to partly overcome the challenges presented by such a convoluted plot. The accompanying music was unexpected and modernistic but the talent of the musicians was unmistakable.

The cast’s desire that the play should speak to the audience and leave them with something to consider was duly met with the line “Neo-colonialism is intoxicating!” which resonated long after the play had ended. It was an intense and passionate performance even if the audience left the theatre feeling slightly bewildered.

The Servants’ Ball Blitzkrieg is an amalgamation of two plays about Zimbabwean independence, two student directors’ creative juices, a puppet maker’s expert fruits, the wild dreams of a skip-diver, and a musical director’s original take on the whole mind-boggling thing. It is an absurdist romance punctuated by poems and ballads, word games and slapstick, poking fun at the new world and lamenting the old, or, perhaps, vice versa.

Sophie Lewis and Matthew Waksman got together under the auspices of the University Marechera Celebration, a symposium (for which Sophielle originally helped garner support) bringing together postcolonialists and artists from all over Africa and the wider world this May. Their show is not a direct homage to Marechera in any way, and takes enormous liberties with its mise en scène, but remains true to what was perceived as the provocative energy and anti-establishment poeticism of his texts.

SBBK, as Lewis and Waksman’s project is known on the inside, tells the story of the re-negotiations taking place in the new age of “re-con-cil-i-a-tion” post Independence, both ‘upstairs’ where the colonials self-congratulate, and ‘downstairs’ where the servants drink chibuku and kachasu. (Or as it happens, inside the lavatory, or outside in the shebeen.)

Thomas is the obsequious servant (and opportunistic go-getter) serving Comrade Norman Drake, colonial fat cat par excellence. He and his cronies hang out on the bleachers, together with audience members invited to join them for their haunting dance sequences and their drunken discussions about employment, the minimum wage, or the future of Zimbabwe. Drake, on the other side of the space, presides over a party riddled with double-dealing, hypocrisy and corruption, for which the gruesome toilet is the uncanny symbol. Each actor takes on a ‘Toilet’ and a ‘Servant’ persona by switching costumes audience members are kind enough to hold in the interim.

It seemed natural to piece the plays together to create an upstairs/downstairs effect. We have made the decision to cast both gender and race blind, a decision, we feel, that will ask the audience not only to focus on the issue of class (as much as on the issue of race) but one that will also make the audience question their racial preconceptions. Racial and sexual politics in our production are embodied by an androgynous and racially unspecific ensemble, an experiment in theatre semiotics of a kind Oxford has been severely lacking despite recent forays into ensemble/promenade theatre thanks to E.T.C.

To add to the Absurd elements of the play we have a six piece music ensemble that is both background music and an actual performing band which interacts with the actors. The actors play different roles in the different plays and show their character changes subtly and neatly through music and symbolic prop changes. These are two plays about post-independent Zimbabwe, a world of hypocrisy, corruption and naïve ideals but these are also two plays with sparkling emotive and Absurdist dialogue which creates much wider identification.

Sophielle 5 May 2009

‘Neocolonialism is intoxicating!’ declares Thomas (Priyanka Mantha) to the disgust of Bonzo, Mupangani and friends, as he sets down a crate of free beer bestowed on him by his boss, the “real comrade” Norman Drake. The advantages, and the shame, of Thomas’s position, are deftly exposed in Marechera’s drama, which ultimately gives way to nihilist hysterics, and the suggestion of real, possible change. Mantha’s character, derided as a suck-up, himself abuses the servant of a black family as a sell-out (“they are the ones who will really oppress you”). Yet Thomas ends up using Drake’s white puppet-head as a prop for a cruel pastiche of him and all like him who bribe and fuck under a veneer of socialist honour and high culture.

Linda Laatikainen prevails in the sexual economy of the ‘comrade’ neocolonials as Mrs Lydia Nzuzu, a predatory woman whom independence has made look ridiculous. Married to the Minister bribed by Drake for the presidency of the congress of commerce (as Thomas parodies it later on when he finally cracks), she winds Drake around her little finger with the ease of a boa constrictor: “Norman you are simply delicious, the bedrooms are this way I think.” Laatikainen doubles up as Sarah, the mad and largely silent female presence in the Servants’ Ball, whose body appears to be open game for the frustrated inmates of the shebeen.

Jay Bernard, a poet, runs the shop there as Granny Beri. But on the other side of the space she is ‘Shogun’, Marechera’s demotic ‘Asian stereotype’, Drake’s lewd bodyguard-cum-spy. Initially obedient (‘Sir, they cannot get enough of your esteemed Caucausian manhood’) Shogun ends the play with a rebellious cackle: ‘Toilet make joke on whole country!’ In the face of this, even Chris Turner, of Imps fame, is left speechless. Turner mans the unholy stuffed carcass of Drake and all he represents, while Harry Fox, Claire Little and Kit Dorey slimily ooze around him and the toilet. Little and Dorey, as Majazi and Old Man Bonzo in the world of the servants’, gracefully lead choreographies expressive of confusion, distrust in, and longing for the future, to Osborn’s rendering of Marechera’s poems: “what have I done my love? Our forest is on fire... today’s gossip is tomorrow’s mountains”.

Meanwhile actual interactions between the two worlds are mediated via Alfie, the Dambudzo Marechera silhouette, psychotic dilettante able to hob nob to some extent with the sneering ministers of Blitzkrieg and the raucous workers of The Servants’ Ball. Alfie, played by Sophie Lewis, speaks a double tongue, a mimicry reflecting the psychic split engendered by his English education and subsequent return to a country where, as he says in mock-thug, “the horns is out and de comrade is in, but de act is still de same.” Lewis breaks down in an attempt to Latinize ‘good Shona beer-drinking songs’, having left the boss’s party and collapsed drunk in the shebeen. Her ‘Alfie’ finally revives to orchestrate the ritual marriage of ‘Raven’ and ‘Dick’, son and daughter of the so-called reconciliation regime, played by Joseph Minden and Lucy Fyffe. All stand and toast the future of Zimbabwe.

The two plays, The Servants’ Ball and Blitzkrieg (aka ‘The Toilet) seemed to fit together perfectly, and after a quick script splicing job, the full-scale, multifarious whole began to emerge. Lewis and Waksman both have a history of ensemble directing (including Spring Quartet, The Lucky Ones, and Small Stylish Silver Deco at Oxford), and a shared impatience with student productions that stay square, predictable, and safe. Their project has been daringly experimental, and collaborative in the extreme, bringing together the independent conceptions of Laurence Osborn – who put together an orchestra – Anna Svensson – who created Comrade Drake and his guests’ bib-like costumes out of scraps – and Sarah Skenazy – mistress of the loo, whose catchword was bottles, bottles, bottles. “I dreamt of the devil”, sing vocalists Grace Newcombe and Ben Wingfield (backed by Julian Bacharach and Joe Phillips): “he had put whitewash on the door / the rain has refused to fall. Come, come, come to the meeting.” It works, it thrills, so come along.

Book tickets by emailing: [email protected] [£5 student, £7 non student]

Sternberg 5 May 2009

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