Panafest 2005: Review of ben Abdallah's The Slaves Revisited

Going to see the same play twice within a week might be considered an unusual experience—even more so if the play, produced in the men's dungeon of Elmina Castle as well as in a second location at the Centre for National Culture in Cape Coast, changes so much as to shift from tragedy to comedy without altering the original text except in minor details. That is what happened during PANAFEST 2005 with Mohammed ben Abdallah's The Slaves, which was performed by two different theater groups: the first under the management of Eolo Garbin and Victor Yankah, and the second directed by the author himself. In this latter case, however, the performance was presented under the title The Slaves Revisited. Already launched on 25 February at Legon as part of "African American Heritage Month," the play was included in the PANAFEST schedule together with The Slaves with the apparent aim of proposing a comparison, which has been quite effective. What should really have struck the audience is not so much the difference in the settings (the claustrophobic and disquieting dungeon where hundreds of slaves had been kept before being sold as slaves, and the spacious and more cheerful space of the theater at the CNC) or even the difference in the titles, but rather the capacity to adapt a text to suit entirely opposite situation. This capacity, besides casting questions on the very text of The Slaves (Was it meant by the author to be "neutral" and did he write it so that it could be performed in different ways? Or was it reinterpreted in order to adapt the first attempt by the author, who wrote the play in 1972, to a totally different situation?), might also cast some doubt on the generic structure and meaning of African theater as represented by a Ghanaian work. Was The Slaves Revisited a type of experimentation with form, or could the performance be seen as a reflection of what African theater has become and needs to be almost fifty years after many countries of the anglophone area obtained independence? In this review, though, far from trying to propose any new critical approach for the subject, I will rather concentrate on the analysis of the event itself, first describing the differences between the two performances and then attempting to propose a conclusion on the basis of my direct observation.

The first performance, The Slaves, which took place on 26 July, was meant to follow the PANAFEST schedule at Elmina, which had been set aside as a morning dedicated to the Akwaaba Ceremony and to a general reflection on the forced diaspora of the African people. The Akwaaba Ceremony was then postponed to the following day, but the decision to set the play in Elmina could still be considered an obvious choice, given that the fort, together with that of Cape Coast, was one of the most important sites of detention for the slaves on their way to the New World. This historical tie made Elmina a natural setting for representing the lives of the slaves, and the play thus needed no other scenography apart from the bare walls and a few lights. Moreover, packing thirty people into one of the two hot and humid men's dungeons of the castle, the directors had the audience directly involved in an atmosphere of sorrow and "seriousness" felt almost physically by the spectators. Therefore, the first performance of the play was consequently perceived as a tragedy, due also to the plot. If one had to summarize the play, one would have to say that not much actually happens in The Slaves, which basically portrays the daily life of a group of slave in a dungeon. Diverging from historic reality, the playwright put male and female actors on the stage together as though they had not been kept in segregated cells. After a brief time, the group beings to prepare a conspiracy against the dungeon overseer, a black who is helping the whites in managing the slave trade, and they take a vow not to reveal the secret. As may be...