“Strong performances by Nicholle Cherrie as Fanny and Anni Domingo as Mary Prince are the heart of this impassioned and enjoyable show.”
‘The stately homes of England / How beautiful they stand / To prove the upper classes / Have still the upper hand’. So sang Noël Coward in a famously ironic lyric about the decline that led to many of these grand houses being left to the National Trust. Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’ is named after one such house, and was her third novel, published in 1814. As the National Trust has only recently acknowledged, many of these properties are intimately linked with the long and shameful history of British colonialism and enslavement.
Austen wrote her novel at a critical time in the struggle against slavery and it contains many hidden references to it. Austen herself was arguably an abolitionist and one of her favourite poems proclaimed ‘We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?’. The trade in slaves was abolished seven years before she wrote Mansfield Park, but slavery itself was not abolished by Britain until 19 years later.
Austen’s plot concerns a newly wealthy family who own a plantation in Antigua. Young Fanny Price is sent to live with her aunt and uncle at Mansfield Park where she falls in love with a cousin and is the subject of unwelcome attentions from the scheming Henry Crawford. Eventually she marries her cousin Edmund.
Two Gents Company has its roots in Zimbabwe, and in this highly original and provocative adaptation, co-writers and directors Tonderai Munyevu and Arne Pohlmeier place the stain of slavery in the spotlight. Fanny Price’s story is interweaved with that of Mary Prince, the first black woman to publish an autobiography describing her experience as a slave.
The style of the piece is inspired by apartheid era South African workshop theatre. It is being performed outdoors in the Watermill garden and the current run was preceded by a short tour to venues which included Jane Austen’s own house. Props and staging are kept simple and the always-present cast talk directly to the audience. Periodically they drop out of the play to provide commentary on it.
Strong performances by Nicholle Cherrie as Fanny and Anni Domingo as Mary Prince are the heart of this impassioned and enjoyable show. Cherrie’s work as Voice Captain shows in the vivid clarity of her engagement with the audience. In her performance, Fanny is a feisty and assertive woman typified by her exclamation at ‘the pain of falling in love with this wet man!’ Anni Domingo brings great soul and much pathos to her part as the enslaved Mary Prince.
Olivier award-winning Wela Mbusi is a commanding presence and the best cast of three who play the slave-owner Sir Thomas Bertram. In other scenes Mbusi swaps with great agility from male to female character, even playing both sides of a conversation between a man and a woman in one nicely comic scene. The remainder of the cast is made up by the accomplished Velile Tshabalala, who takes on five roles, and by Duramaney Kamara, six.
In Louise Worrall’s conceptually inspired set, on-stage action is literally framed by a great gilt picture frame beneath which a set of glistening white cube shaped furniture evokes the sugar trade.
In the first half I wasn’t at all sure why the play didn’t simply bring to life the important story of Mary Prince instead of mixing it in with this less impressive example of Jane Austen’s ‘sweet tooth for love and marriage’. But in the second half the tension within and between the two parallel stories comes to the fore with some winningly powerful writing and performance.
This interesting and polemical play ends with a passionate defence of the ‘woke’ in a scene in which Mary Prince and Jane Austen meet. ‘Beneath it all there’s blood, real blood. That blood is in our memory.’
“charmingly explores the joys and trials of these relationships, but was lacking that zip needed to really lift it”
Next time you’re on the Jubilee line, stop off at the library next to Canada Water station. There, along with a good collection of books and a cute café, you can go into a fantastic theatre space. Both large and comfortable, and properly rigged for lighting, Canada Water Theatre is an excellent space to put on a show, a sentiment which Two Gents Productions clearly share. Their production of ‘The Incident’ is playing here, and it is a relationship drama about Jan and Monica. Both teach at the same school, both live in Sweden and both are seemingly in love with each other. The big difference: Jan is Swedish and Monica is from Zimbabwe. The play tackles the couples’ struggles to communicate and understand each other, as well as wider social issues concerning racial politics in Sweden and indeed globally.
The two actors both held their own in this two-hander; however it was Cassandra Hercules playing the part of Monica who really shone. She had the difficult task of articulating racial struggle in a way that wasn’t cliché or too bleak. She was successful, as her whole performance was rich with physical energy and clear connection to her thoughts. David Weiss’ Jan was a much more stuck up and stiff character than Monica, however there were moments where I felt his character came across as particularly cold and cruel, especially when ‘consoling’ Monica when she was upset over past racial prejudices she had experienced.
In terms of the writing, there seemed to be a lot of significance weighted onto lines with clear messages, and not as much attention on the subtext and moments in between. Joakim Daun’s award-winning script has a few of these moments of unnecessary exposition, filling the audience in on information that we can get simply through good direction and use of the space. The scene where Jan informs Monica of her suspension from work was an excellent example of using distance between the actors and fast pace to create energy and plenty of subtext. It would have been fantastic if this quality was present throughout the piece.
The play is an international one, and has been performed all over the world. In the lobby before the show I was able to witness a wonderful mixing of cultures, as Swedish and African audience members were meeting and discussing the upcoming show. The piece charmingly explores the joys and trials of these relationships, but was lacking that zip needed to really lift it.
