Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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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

 

 

- P. K. Brask