Michael Abbensetts has always created powerful drama out of the angst of West Indian immigrants, Often it's an angst tied to their reasons for leaving home , but complicated by the problems of coping in a strange environment. It doesn't help, either, that these characters find themselves part of the minority culture.
This is a painful discovery for Ramsay James, the displaced former prime minister of a Caribbean territory who is the main character in "The Lion." A browning with all the pretensions of that group, James finds he's just "one more black man catching his ass in England.
Like many of Abbsensetts' characters, James tries desperately to maintain his status and style. He travels with Hendricks, his bodyguard, obeahman, and efficient murderer of 19 people during James' repressive rule.
James, of course , finds there is a psychic price to pay for his hubris . In England to swap information with the Foreign Office, he must cotch in a fashionable flat owned by his ex-wife Isabella, a black woman who resents James for using and abusing her when he held power. James also hopes to be reunited with his daughter Sonia, from a brief union with a white Englishwoman.
He plans to bring his ill-gotten gains to England to live lavishly while he plots to oust the new government in St. Jude. But the new thugs confiscate his wealth and place a price on his head. Isabella is only too delighted to kick him out. The poor man must now share his daughter's humble living room with Hendricks.
The ladder keeps slipping, he tells himself, as he endures nightmares in which he is haunted by the people Hendricks eliminated. Obeah doesn't help, and his situation worsens when he discovers that Sonia's boyfriend, Gideon, is the son of one of these people. Gideon wants to kill James to avenge his father and keep a promise to his mother. But he only succeeds in ostracizing Sonia from her father and himself. Gideon hands the gun to Isabella. She is tempted, but finds a much more satisfying denouement when she lets James do the job himself.
It doesn't seem the kind of ending that a character as narcissistic as James would write for himself. Stefan kalipah, whose convincing performance as James encourages the audience to hate the character, says the playwright never really gave the play an ending. So director Horace Ove and the cast from the Talawa Theatre Company worked it out in rehearsals last September for the play's first run at the Cochrane Theatre in London.
The best indication of Kalipha's handling of his role is the superb compliment the audience paid him: in typical Jamaican fashion, they hurled insults at his actions and his ego. Except those times he flubbed some lines, his performance as James would be the envy of some practicing politicians. Ironically, Kalipha says the character is so much unlike his own that the director often had to temper his emotional response in some of the scenes with Sonia. James is a cold personality, Kalipha says Ove told him frequently.
There are other script problems in The Lion. Gideon telegraphs too much his connection and his intentions. That reduces the tension in a play meant to be a murder mystery. Sonia seems emotionally simple for a child abandoned to poverty by a rich and powerful father. Colette brown, whose Sonia sometimes sounds too adolescent, doesn't entirely agree with that. But she believes the character may have lost something in the editing of nearly an hour off Abbensetts' original work. Hendricks, played ably by David Webber, Makes too stereotypical a move when he abandons James for a white girl.
Madge Sinclair, of course, stole the stage as Isabella. It would have been a pity if those forces in Britishtheatre circles had succeeded in keeping her out of the production as they apparently tried to do. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.
Sinclair's experience showed in the relaxed manner she played Isabella. She was the perfect bitch in ever nuance. didn't have to invent the character,says Sinclair, I knew the role almost instinctively. Sinclair thinks the play works better here than in England because the issue in The Lion fit this context. In Abbensetts' work, it's a powerful message to politicians, their minions and their constituencies.
For that reason, The Lion was a good choice to feature in the Ward's Season of Excellence. West Indians love the drama of politics and Abensetts provides plenty of that. The audience suffers knowingly with people of St. Jude, watching James' nineteen years i political life. Like Isabella, they enjoy his downfall and get a perverse thrill from his inability to manage his personal affairs once out of office.
Abbensetts is a matter of the one-liner, and he captures West Indian language and wit superbly. It's like trying to have a conversation with a flame thrower, James says of Isabella. Before you I knew only polite Caribbean men, she tells small time. And the ultimate insult from Hendricks: I am not a politician, I can't sit on my ass all day.
The politics of this play resound here, says Colette Brown. Producer Yvonne Brewster , who has been in theatre all her life - her family garage became the Barn Theatre, which she developed - says all kinds of niceties and immediacies come out on this stage that were missed by the English audience.
The British Council, which sponsors one production each season at the Ward, says this is the first time it has brought a play. We had tried unsuccessful to bring a Shakespearean group, says Nikki Johnson, the Council's Arts Officer. The response to this is encouraging.
Doreen Thompson, Chairman of the Ward Theatre's Executive Committee, says she is pleased with the production and with the Ward's partnership with the British Council. Significantly, the Ward called this production of The Lion, The Caribbean Premiere. Thompson says it couldn't be called anything else, with a Guyanese playwright, a Trinidadian director and male lead, a Jamaican producer and female lead. We are happy to have Madge Sinclair and Yvonne Brewster work here with us, says Thompson.
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