Have you ever watched a play so mind-bending that no amount of watching it is enough — if it showed for 365 days and ‘life’ was suspended for a spell you would not miss one? That was me in the left stand at Playwright’s Playhouse on my first viewing of Philip Luswata’s version of Thirty Years of Bananas. Me again at the second, when the legend himself watched the show. Me again at the third, when the happenstance of traffic jams and family business required me to give up my seat. I couldn’t get enough of it. Few Ugandan scripts can match the immense intensity achieved in this script.
I was about 6 or 7 years old when I first experienced an Alex Mukulu play. My mother loved plays. She would sometimes take my siblings to see shows at Bat Valley Theatre and National Theatre, which were near our home. By some arbitrary measure, she decided one Sunday afternoon that I was now old enough to go to the theatre and so we went to watch Alex Mukulu. Life never stayed the same.
I can’t remember that show’s title but I still remember leaving with words “post-traumatic-stress-disorder” imprinted in my mind. Whenever I hear that word a picture of Alex Mukulu flashes in my mind. He is standing right of the stage (orientation from the audience), hands clasping his head, explaining to another actor the horrors of a war he had experienced. The word comes out as brick in the face. Just when the character reveals what ails him he uses a word that goes over my head. The moment is so powerful that I cannot settle until I’ve wrestled an explanation. That is how visceral the experience of an Alex Mukulu script can be. There is something in it even for a 9-year-old child.
Years later, when I was older and soaked in theatre-making of a sort, I would connect my love of theatre to those early years before 98. But my profound respect for theatre and literature would remain one of the things you can’t explain about yourself until Philip Luswata brought back Thirty Years of Bananas for the opening of a new theatre space he runs.
Balintuma Road is 5 minutes away from the city center by car on a jam-free day. 30/40 minutes if you like to walk. It is one of the eeriest roads in Kampala. At night it seems dark and cold and desolate. In the day it feels abandoned. A navy blue signpost with words “Playwright’s Playhouse” etched in white paint — between the colour combination and small print, it is barely legible at any time of the day, worse still when sun’s light has turned in for the night. It is easy to get lost if you are unfamiliar with the geography of Mengo, but none of that matters once the play begins.
Your mind starts to prep for the mandatory slow start typical to Ugandan productions. You distract yourself with puny, meaningless particulars; the lighting set seems arranged for concert and not theatre, the auditorium feels like a football arena squeezed into a theatre hall, no one warned you about the bone-biting cold, then… a song chorus bursts forth from the backstage tucked beneath the audience stand. Young men and women dressed in unmatching soccer uniforms appear everywhere — on the stage, in the stands, under the stands, behind the stage, in your head… they sing and dance move with such energy and gusto that the senses you came with are instantly wiped away. You are firmly sucked into the world of the play, and now the magic can begin.
Sitting through the first half of a play was a painfully pleasant chore. The singing and dancing were so enjoyable, the actors so wholly immersed, and the script so alive and animated; all I wanted to do was hop off my chair and join them. That is how powerful the performance was. Speaking to Philip Luswata in an interview weeks later, he would tell me they could have done better. There was so much they didn’t rehearse well enough that he wished he had had another 6 weeks to rehearse the show. I could see what he meant. Your sense of these things sharpens when you direct and coach actors. With 20 years of theatre-making under his belt, he must be a hard man to please, he has done this at higher levels than most Ugandan actors. It certainly wasn’t a perfect show. It was an excellent show.
I was lucky to be there the night Alex Mukulu came to watch the play. Someone in the auditorium captured him in a moment while doing a video sweep of the audience, as soccer fans like to do in live games. He was very happy. I wonder how Philip Luswata felt when his mentor and former director stood up on the stage and said he had done a better job than he’d done. Luswata was an actor in the second showing of Thirty Years of Bananas — there is a story about a bicycle in there, but that’s for another day — his memory of working with Mukulu is filled with hilarious anecdotes; he was quite the slave-driver, as reputed, but working under his direction gave Luswata the ethic that earned him his greatest achievements.
Thirty Years of Bananas was first written for Uganda’s 30th commemoration of its aborted experiment with democratic rule, sometime circa 1992, when the current president was still new and large on unchecked goodwill. It caused some controversy when it came out. Mukulu declares that no one born before 1962 will change Uganda. While the majority in government at the time were in their thirties and forties, they were the pre-62’ generation the playwright had damned. The criticism was not unfounded. Uganda was making all sorts of records at the time. Areas, where the new government was not fighting a war, were developing at supersonic rates. The sense that the past was past high.
In choosing this play Luswata was motivated by a drive to open Playwrights’ Playhouse with a big production, but the timing was not lost on him:
I felt it’s a play that is very relevant right now. The biggest number of voters in the coming election is thirty years. All these guys have known one leadership, and yet we know that in the first thirty years of our nation we had over eight regime changes, but we’ve never had a regime change in this instance. All these guys know is this regime. I felt it’s a good time for us to remind the young people that there have been changes: do not get scared to create a change when you get the opportunity, or to maintain the status quo, but at least do it when you are informed about our history. It’s not just material for history books. It needs to be part of our conversations. Where have we come from? All we talk about now is Museveni. We don’t talk about history as we know it. That’s the conversation I really want to start with Thirty Years of Bananas.
— excerpt from a conversation with Philip Luswata.
A review for The African Theatre Magazine, Andrew Kaggwa points out [WAK1] an interesting view. For older people in the audience, the show is a surreal reminisce of the 92’ classic, for young people watching it for the first time it is a four-hour crash course in Ugandan history. A history with a funny sense of humour.
In directing this production, Luswata’s forays in the sketch-comedy mix well with formal theatre training in transforming Mukulu’s chorus into an animated object. It feels more like thirty minutes than the three hours it is because his chorus — hard to think of them as a team with all the jubilant singing and dancing — is constantly moving from sketch to sketch of intricate pantomimes that echo its difficult themes without weighed down the viewer. My favourite sketch is the one on Idi Amin’s famous appetite for women. I’m not sure if it was a choice kept from Mukulu’s production but I liked the twist of a woman playing Idi Amin. There is a moment where Idi Amin visits the storyteller’s house and picks out one of her aunts, for the night I presume. In one show, the aunt was played by a man; a subtle quip that sent the auditorium shaking with laughter.
With each sketch, the chorus transforms into a new form that has the actors using the space in a way I had not seen before. One minute they’re in the stands, next on the floor, then the stage, behind at the stage… at some point I would not be surprised if they had flown out the gate and left the audience to act the rest. You could see the contrast in the two approaches when Mukulu gave an impromptu demonstration on the night he was there. He had his chorus sitting to focus the audience’s gaze on the storyteller. Luswata had his moving to hold the reader’s attention. What better validation could he get than having his former director say, you did a better job.