'SS Mendi Dancing the Death Drill' is the Isango Ensemble’s retelling of the negligent wrecking of the SS Mendi, a steam ship bringing black labourers from South Africa in 1917 to assist in the trench-building, latrine-digging and cooking of the Western Front. The play was commissioned by Now14-18, the national arts programme to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, to play at the Nuffield Southampton’s new downtown NST City. For NST, this show is also designed to coincide with their Now-Here theatre festival, supported by Black History Month South, which explores the theme of Southampton’s hidden of migrants and refugees (and accidently became an excellent pun on Theresa May’s “citizens of the world are citizens of Now-Here”).
Sam Hodges, artist director of NST, said that ‘For a story of this magnitude to have been whitewashed from the history books beggars belief’, and this is certainly true. I’m a local and I never learnt about this at school, and for the Southampton audience, the repetition of the phrase ‘12 miles off the Isle of Wight’ is a stark condemnation of the priorities of white, western, US-eurocentric historiography. The play’s paratext is vital in this regard, with a very informative programme and a supplementary booklet free to pick up from the Maritime Archeology Trust, a 43-page history of the ‘Black and Asian Seamen of the Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War’.
The historian David Olusoga notes in the programme notes that the treatment of South Africans in the First World War prefigures aspects of the apartheid system, and the play really uncovers the horrors of the British empire as this unpleasant shading behind the bright and vibrant singing and dancing. We learn to our horror that the ‘soldiers’ are not given guns because ‘no coloured man will ever raise a weapon against a white man’ – not even the enemies of Britain who thirty seconds ago the same character called ‘evil’.
A play like this could very easily be moribund, somber, depressed, but that would become boring with such heavy material – it’s the very vitality of this production which elevate it to something more. The play is based almost entirely around a juxtaposition, between the joyful exuberance of the actors portraying the South Africans sent to war and the cold, mechanical brutality with which they were condemned to death. With energy and intensity, everything was physical and everything was felt. And that’s the way the play worked, it used joyfulness to evoke the horror and brutality by dissonance
This arose from a devising process which was ‘entirely democratic’ according to the director, and this really comes across in the varied way the play comes across as pluralistic rather than ensemble. By which I mean that rather than the group presenting us one unified story there is a swirling toing-and-froing of narratives and perspectives. The ensemble contains many of South Africa’s main ethnic groups, Swazi, Pondo, Zulu, Xhosa, Mfengu, a fact testified to by the diversity of music styles and languages heard on stage. As they say in the programme, it is the mixture and clash of Isango Ensemble’s cultures, races and experience that enables it to create work of the highest class.
The play also breaks stage genre somewhat: it’s a music show in the most part which turns into a documentary- or courtroom drama or agitprop piece at other times. The play is mobile in multiple ways, maybe in opposition to the strict rigidity with which the Mendi’s crew were transported.
Most striking about the production, dance and song are woven through the whole thing and a mixture of styles of song as well. There’s an overflowing of the exuberant, huge harmonis of mbube and isicathamiya music, but the casts vocal range also extends to the drama of opera Most of the cast have opera training and have performed opera as Isango Ensemble’s aim is to reimagine classics from the Western theatre canon, including re-orchestrating Mozart’s The Magic Flutefor South African instruments. It’s haunting how the traditional acapella subtly got more alienated and faint the further the crew got from home.
Music is also used to comic effect, as in a G&S-style light-opera ditty about the British Empire with tongue-in-cheek patriotism, an attitude also taken to some recognisable first world war song – it’s clear that the musical director engaged well with the period. On particularly stand-out beautiful song was a Graceland- or gospel-style ‘Danny Boy’.
This play is truly fantastic, a beautiful, poignant ode to the lives lost, which uses its gripping storytelling, attention to individuals and moving music to draw attention to the history you’ve probably never heard before.
[5 stars]
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