Abstract
The Royal Court Theatre has provided a launching pad for a variety of authors from Africa or, more recently, of African descent. This chapter explores the dynamics behind half a century of performing Africa at the Royal Court, with specific reference to Wole Soyinka, Femi Ajibade, Athol Fugard, and Bola Agbaje. Central to the investigation are the papers in the English Stage Company archive at the V&A, especially William Gaskill’s 1966 correspondence, as well as reviews and newspaper cuttings. It will be argued that attitudes to ‘Africa’ at the Royal Court have changed with the progressive gentrification of this venue, and attempts to achieve an ‘international’ dimension.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement n° 299000. I also acknowledge the archives of the English Stage Company at the V&A Museum, London, for all quotations from press cuttings, as well as for the correspondence of the staff at the Royal Court Theatre, as indicated. Warm thanks are due to Mervyn McMurtry for an inspiring paper on Fugard’s The Island at the 2013 conference of the African Theatre Association (AfTA), and for some very useful bibliographical suggestions (amongst which, Mitchell 1976). I’m also grateful to Thomas Kell at Tiata Fahodzi for a very interesting conversation on the staging of Bola Agbaje’s Belong, Femi Elufowoju Jr for sharing contacts, and Sola Adeyemi for bringing my attention to Lindfors 2011. Many thanks also to Michael Pearce for his comments on the first draft of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Some passing references to Ajibade , Fugard and Soyinka are included in Philip Roberts’ The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and in Doty and Harbin 1990, these volumes being otherwise heavily focused on the better-known, mainstream productions of the Royal Court. Investigating the African work on this stage is also further complicated by a seeming lack of questionnaires, statistics, and/or surveys on audiences’ reactions and composition—except for a questionnaire drawn up by the BBC in occasion of the broadcast of a radio version of Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel , see Lindfors 2011.
- 2.
The ‘Season’ included The Island , Sizwe Bansi is Dead , and Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act .
- 3.
The Spectator, for instance, stated that ‘[a]s black actors (if a simple truth can be stated without its seeming either racialist or patronising) they [Kani and Ntshona ] are in a class of their own in Britain’ (2 February 1974).
- 4.
It may therefore not be surprising that some of the most generous reviews of the South African Season are to be found on the small and ardently left-wing Morning Star, with straightforward titles as ‘South African prisoners’ for Jack Sutherland’s review of The Island (4 January 1974) or ‘Apartheid condemned’ for that of Sizwe Bansi (11 January).
- 5.
Ipi Tombi would also be staged at Theatre Arts Ibadan in November 1976 (see Adedokun 2008, 101).
- 6.
See, however, the episode of 18 March of the BBC programme ‘Kaleidoscope’, in which the late scholar John Weightman—in a statement that is somewhat the reverse of what Wardle affirms—pointed out to how Parcel Post’s aimed at ‘presenting the Nigerians sympathetically for an English audience ’.
- 7.
The Daily Mail of 2 November 1959 states that the poems and songs were received ‘with more politeness than comprehension’ by the audience .
- 8.
See for instance the review ‘African Playwright and Poet’, The Times, 2 November 1966.
- 9.
On the relevance of the audiences’ knowledge of the political background of plays, see Lindfors 2011, in which, analysing a survey distributed by the BBC after the broadcast of a radio version of the Lion and the Jewel some six months before it opened at the Royal Court, he points out to the contrast ‘between the unenthusiastic and uneasy reactions of listeners with no experience of African life and the overwhelmingly positive responses of those who had lived and worked in Nigeria or other parts of West Africa’ (51).
- 10.
Part of this strategy was the launching, at the end of the 1950s, of the Sunday night ‘productions without decor’, in which plays were ‘rehearsed up to dress rehearsal point, but performed with only indications of scenery and costumes’ (Findlater 1981, 42), and cost as little as £100 compared to the £5000 usually needed for a full production. Amongst the productions: Doris Lessing’s Each His Own Wilderness (23 March 1958), Soyinka’s The Invention (1 November 1959), and William Gaskill and Keith Johnstone’s Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp (19 July 1959); see Findlater 1981, 47.
- 11.
The Kensington News of 30 December 1966, discussing Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel .
- 12.
John Barber in the Daily Telegraph of that 17 March 1976, discussing Ajibade’s Parcel Post. The play was perceived by the critic as being ‘too conventional’ for the average programme of the Royal Court, had it not been for ‘the curious dialect, the old rites practised by the superstitious, the dressing-up in silks for the party […]. All this seemed real and authentic’ and therefore adequate to what may be expected on that stage.
- 13.
Athol Fugard, in conversation with Richard Findlater, recalls how, at the time of his ‘South African Season’, ‘there was never any attempt [on the part of the Royal Court] to iron out the wrinkles in the complexity of what we were doing’ (Findlater 1981, 160).
- 14.
With the notable exception of Biyi Bandele’s plays.
- 15.
For a more detailed discussion of this, see Michael Pearce 2017, chapter 6.
- 16.
‘The theatre of the ghetto certainly has its place: it does indeed depict one reality of black life in London. But it is essentially limiting and stultifying. More nuanced, more deserving plays now need to be seen, depicting other, equally valid realities and facets of the black British experience. For the ghetto is not black London’s only reality. What about my reality? My milieu is comprised of barristers, doctors, media, and arts types. We’d like our reality represented too. And I know for a fact that none of us spells “ends” with a “z” (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/black-theatre-is-blighted-by-its-ghetto-mentality-6709941.html).
- 17.
See also Ekumah 2015, who notes that Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! wishes to ‘make a case for Nigerians in a Caribbean dominated arena’ (182) and ‘reads as a rejection of the notion of a black British identification’ (183).
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Morosetti, T. (2018). ‘On One of Those Sunday Nights’: 50 Years of Africa at the Royal Court Theatre. In: Morosetti, T. (eds) Africa on the Contemporary London Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94508-8_4
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