They Drink It in the Congo (Almeida, 27 August)

I'm thrilled that the Almeida dedicated such considerable resources to this sprawling, awkward, difficult play. This was smarter than anything I've seen about the dynamics of international events as their reflections play out in a major city like London. From its title onwards, this announced that it was aware--hyper-aware--of the pitfalls of addressing something like politicized sexual violence in the Congo, and did its best. More and more I think some of the things we say about theater forces what appears on stage into ever-safer shapes. I pick on last year's Almeida Medea a lot, but I see that as sympatomatic of this tendency: if reaching out of North London life is problematic, then by god we'll just stick to that milieu. 

A British aid worker (problem!) tries to create awareness (problem!) about violence in the Congo (problem!) by staging a cultural festival (problem!) that will involve actual Congolese people (problem) living in London (PROBLEM!). And at every stage this doesn't work: the aid worker's boss doesn't care, members of the diaspora are opposed (potentially violently) to the idea, and office politics threaten to kill everything anyway. So this is maybe further out even than the action of Waiting for Godot--rather than watching characters deal directly with an existential situation, we see a team failing to secure funding for the First Annual Godot Festival; we might not be able to fund him, even if he were going to show up. 

Looking at reviews this play got, I see the p-word--problematic--rearing its tawny, GCSE-certified head. Yes, theatre attempting to show a world riddled with conflict can occasionally represent deep, unresolved, ugly conflicts, and occasionally be at cross-purposes with itself. This play, bless it, made this lack of resolution central to its staging: the entire second act took place around the huge hollowed-out pit made at the end of the first act by resource mining. The refusal to let the two worlds be separate forced everyone in the second act to literalize what was figurative in this kind of play: that they were walking around a problem that nothing onstage was going to solve, or even really address systematically, but that was still there. 

There is in the middle of this as shocking a scene as I think I've seen in London theatres, the close before-and-after of a graphic rape scene. Unlike a lot of stylized violence I've seen onstage this past year, however--I'm thinking particularly of that Young Vic Macbeth--the staging suggested that this act never went away, was never resolved by anything, even as the end of the play presented a necessarily half-assed representation. It was perfectly willing to point out the insufficiencies of theatre--a metropolitan middle-class form that plays primarily to white audiences--and then, still, defiantly, did something. This was maybe a play about a gesture, and maybe that gesture was as futile and silly as the Congolese band playing Smiths covers in the final moments. 

This is a big play, and some parts were more slack than others; parts felt slightly under-rehearsed, although I think this may have had more to do with the actors' need to flip rapidly between accents, speech in Lingala being represented (in a stage conceit) as said out loud in neutral English. But these moments of awkwardness were redeemed by the play's ambition. This play did I think something genuinely political, holding open the conditions for everyone who saw it to see a basic element of life in the world as haunted by what happens elsewhere in the world.