A Season In the Congo review, Young Vic

An air conditioned room and Chiwetel Ejiofor within reaching distance?  It's too good an offer to miss when, outside, the oppressive heat is unremitting and your clothes stick to your back, just as they would in the dense jungles of the Congo. And then you get inside The Young Vic and you're in The Congo.  This isn't conveyed through a tropical set, sunshine lighting or sound effects but, like every other production set in Africa, through colourful dancing and singing.

A reason for the bongoes?

Is it that playwrights - even if they hail from the great continent - see Africans as people infantilised by their culture and their spiritual beliefs, or is it western directors who create the stereotype?  Brit pop flourished throughout Blair's time in office and the likes of Jordan and Kerry Catona embodied the cult of celebrity spawned by our interest in popular culture - but I don't see clubbers bouncing around to Orbit, or Glasto field folk holding up lighters for Don't Look Back in Anger, in any works by David Hare. There are no boom box soundtracks running under the reenactments of the Lawrence Inquiry or the war on terror, or the horrors of Iraq. We laugh at Miss Marple and Midsomer Murders and their stereotyped motifs of English rural life, yet here we are, time and again, rolling out the jungle drums when Africans feature on stage.

So it is that the balance in Aime Cesaire's story of Patrice Lumumba, A Season in the Congo, directed by Joe Wright from a translation by Ralph Manheim, feels totally wrong for a serious political piece about the first democratically elected leader of the Congo. The audience was invited to, and did, clap along to music in the interval... Lamumba was an educated political activist with a history of confrontation, but we get no sense of what made him the man he was,  or of the extraordinary brutality of the Belgians whose thieving hands were all over the country's minerals. Instead we have a timeline of entry level scenes and entertainments with puppets, false noses and balletic pretend-fighting. Lumumba was doomed. His left wing politics at a time when Russia and America were within a whisker of nuclear war, were unacceptable and the US was as dirty in its behaviour as the Belgians, seeing him off within weeks and murdering him within months. 

In conclusion: Ejiofor has the luminosity of the real star. The audience adored him. He glitters on the stage, even when pushed into playing guitar for Mrs Lumumba. One imagined Tony and Cherie sharing a spot of Bob Dylan as wedding parties were blown up in Baghdad, but I don't suppose that would be considered realistic. 

References
The Young Vic, Tickets

The Young Vic, 66 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LZ     Run ends 22 August