Macbeth lives and dies in the Congo

Third World Bunfight - Macbeth

Image by Barbican Centre

By Daniel Nelson

Shakespeare’s Macbeth meets Italian composer Giuseppi Verdi meets South African director Brett Bailey: the result is sensational.

The only tragedy is that the opera runs a mere four days in London.

If you don’t like Shakespeare, are not an opera fan, don’t speak Italian:  don’t worry - it doesn’t matter.

Bailey isn’t an opera-lover either: “I am not particularly interested in it. I find the plots and libretto absolutely ridiculous.”

What he likes is the story – which he sets in contemporary Congo. The plot is now about what has been called Africa’s First World War, with Macbeth a warlord, multinationals stirring the pot instead of witches, and neighbouring countries deeply involved. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni are fingered though not named

Bailey givcs the opera another twist, too: the all-African cast are presented as Congolese who have unearthed the tattered costumes left by a visiting opera troupe who performed in their area years ago: “Like the tens of thousands of Africans who flock to Europe every year in small boats or on planes, but who are seen as problematic, names statistics, these performers have a desperate story to tell.

“They are emissaries from the Great Lakes region, come to put their story firmly on the world stage.”

As militia-leader Macbeth’s story unfolds, mostly in the form of tableaux in turn witty and dramatic, illustrations are flashed onto the giant screen behind the singers, and occasionally are used to ram home the message of corporate exploitation that underpins the years of conflict in Congo.

“Themes that recur in my works,” says Bailey, “are the hidden atrocities committed in African by rapacious colonial powers; the ruthless exploitation of the resources of the ‘developing world’ by multinationals; the forgotten ‘underworld’ in which millions of people toil in misery to supply goods and raw materials for the markets of the rich world; and the instability fuelled in these countries by expedient ‘Super Powers’.”

Don’t get the wrong idea. What this Macbeth gives you is not earnest preachiness, but strong voices and great music (hats off to composer Fabrizio Cassal who has spent time with indigenous peoples in the Central African Republic and has worked with musicians from Egypt, India and Senegal, and to the on-stage musicians of the No Borders Orchestra who hail from various parts of another stressed state, the former Yugoslavia), joy, verve, exuberance, directness, colour, pizazz, and extraordinary lighting.  

Lighting is something I rarely notice and never draw attention to, but the colour-light combo in this production drives the whole marvellous ensemble through your eyes and into your brain.

Ok, it’s not perfect. Once or twice the otherwise wonderful surtitles strike a false note (“Chin up, Macbeth” hardly captures his catastrophic collapse) and, more seriously, the whole shebang occasionally tips dangerously close to stereotyping. An audience member who suggested a lack of sensitivity to Africa in a post-show Q&A was given short shrift by Bailey (“Well, that’s your opinion”), and needed a more thoughtful response.

But, overall, this is deliciously, rousingly, entertainingly iconoclastic.

·         Macbeth after Giuseppi Verdi, 16-20 September, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2. Info:  7638 8891/ mailto:tickets@barbican.org.uk

+ Another – even more controversial – Brett Bailey presentation, Exhibit B,  is playing at The Vaults, Leake Street, SE1 on 23-27 September. It replicates the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays that showed Africans as objects of scientific curiosity through the 19th and early 20th centuries, translated here into 12 tableaux, each featuring motionless performers placed in settings drawn from real life: "Collectively they confront colonial atrocities committed in Africa, European notions of racial supremacy and the plight of immigrants today". Info: http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=16226 Barbican

+  Exhibit B – facing the appalling reality of Europe's colonial past