Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011
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MUNGO PARK – THE MAN BEHIND THE NAME
(Mungo Park, Kolding, visiting production at Mungo Park, Allerød, Denmark, 2011)
on a Friday evening Allerød seems dead to the world
as my father and I seek out a place to eat before the show
we locate Cafésen in the centre of town and eat elaborate
starbursts (fried plaice with rémoulade, mayo, topped
with lemon, caviar and shrimp) though I’d rather have had
Shabbat dinner at home in Winnipeg with plain roasted
chicken and my special potatoes and listening to grandkids
singing the blessings. It’s Shabbat Shelach where Moses
sends scouts (and spies) into Canaan to get the lay of the land
there are only six other people in the restaurant which is concerning
but the health inspector’s certificate in the window shows a big smiley
and the starburst is tasty. We fear for the life of Allerød that this level
of tastiness attracts so few, but hope maybe they’re used to better
and it turns out that they are because at the theatre it is a full house
and the show is alive with three male actors telling the story of Mungo Park
the Scottish explorer, often seen as a spy, who charted the course
of the Niger for Britain’s Africa Association, and in the first act survived
through kindness and his insistence that negroes were human
and should be treated as individuals and in the second act discovered
that he was capable of animalistic barbarity and so he makes a good name
for a theatre that wants to engage us with the best and the worst of ourselves
facing all of life’s shellacking
only Park is in something close to a historical costume while the other two
actors play all other parts in their street clothes, outfitted with wigs
and props according to need. The walls and floor of the stage are black
(like the perception of Africa in the 18th Century) with a manually operated
turntable at centre stage. The black walls are soon covered with words written
in chalk (mostly) during the prologue where we are asked to imagine how the story
would be told in a Hollywood movie with a phenomenal budget, opening
with a tracking shot over grass moving in the wind on the Scottish highlands
then taking a gut-dropping flight over a cliff rising from the ocean far below
and there, there on the cliff a small figure is climbing and “we” move in to catch
our first glimpse of the daring young Mungo Park. And I do see that, just
like I see the boat he and his lieutenant steer through the second act
though it is, of course, just a stepladder lying on its side and their guns
are metal pipes. All is accompanied by a sometimes loud, sometimes subtle
soundscape with the bassy tones of Dolby Surround
it is a show built from the imagination exercises taught in most theatre schools
“here’s a pencil, turn it into something else in a story so I can see it”
as audience you have to be willing to fill the gaps between what you see and what
could be. They hint, you picture it in full. Unfortunately
my father prefers his theatre all dressed like the starburst
but I found myself enjoying a version of plain roasted chicken
(albeit superbly prepared and spiced by this crew)
with the added blessings provided by myself