(Traditional)
These words are taken from a Guyanese folk song which is based on legend. Although details of the song’s origins and specific historical reference are veiled by a pall of vagueness and fiction, it fables the well-known tragedy of generations of Guyanese porknockers and of one particular folk hero known as Makantali. It is part of the eternal chase for a mythical El Dorado found as much in local oral poetry as in wider national literature. This particular folk song was the inspiration for drama.
Out of it the play Makantali was created by playwright Harold Bascom, and it won the Guyana Prize for Literature for Best Drama in 1996. As a Guyana Prize winner, it was specially performed at the National Cultural Centre on April 28 as part of the continuing staging of plays that have won the Guyana Prize. This is an initiative of Minister of Culture Charles Ramson Jnr, who determined that the ministry would provide the funding and facilitate these productions. The performances themselves, however, are the full responsibility of the theatre groups that produce them and the income from ticket sales goes to the groups.
Accordingly, the play Sauda by Mosa Telford was part of the Guyana Prize Literary Festival in February, directed by Ayanna Waddell and performed by the National Drama Company. Makantali, the second in the series, was directed by Godfrey Naughton, who headed a production team which included Sonia Yarde as Assistant Director, Simone Dowding as Production Manager, Maria Benschop as Director of Marketing, among others.
This was the second major production of this play, which was performed at the Theatre Guild in 2011 directed by Malcolm De Freitas with a wide-ranging cast. However, it was first seen on stage at Carifesta X in Guyana in 2008 at the end of a workshop training programme. Students emerging from this venture did Makantali as their final assignment, with each Act of the play done by a different group of students.
The play itself holds an important place in Guyanese drama as one of the major works in national literature, standing beside others such as Couvade, Sweet Talk, Miriamy, The Tramping Man and Duenne. In addition to its excellence as dramatic literature, the play is strong as a documentation and analysis of life in the interior of the country among small prospectors and adventurers known as porknockers. It is a world explored by such novels as Black Midas by Jan Carew and Michael Jordan’s Kamarang and documented in comic strip form by Barrington Braithwaite.
Makantali reveals a world immersed in legend. There is tension between wild adventurism, romance and the harsh realities of a dangerous life in the interior among hostile rivers, rapids, and the jungle, with hardship and uncertainty. Hopes and dreams are kept alive in this rough environment, also inhabited by prostitutes who play a vital part in the lives of the porknockers. These women are central to this drama. The inhabitants of that environment need them as much as they are kept motivated by a belief in the supernatural.Guyana’s social history is decorated with tales of legendary porknockers such as Ocean Shark, Tengar, Kaburi Thomas, Gold Dog and Makantali. The recurring story is one of men who leave their families on the coast and venture into the interior chasing El Dorado – dreaming of striking it rich through finds of gold and diamonds. They succeed and emerge in ostentatious glory throwing money around, and unwisely squander it all to be once again reduced to penury. They return to “the bush” and it becomes a continuing cycle. The stories are spiced with their involvement with prostitutes on whom they lavish their wealth, leaving wives waiting and abandoned at home.
In this extremely complex and multi-layered drama, Kenrick Barker, who eventually becomes the legendary Makantali (Sean Thompson), is driven by unemployment and an oppressive, disapproving mother-in-law (Mosa Telford) to leave his wife Lillian (Nathaya Whaul) and go to try his luck in the gold bush. He is lucky and strikes it richer than all his contemporaries. He sends enough wealth to his wife to set up both her and her mother for life, but opts not to return home. Instead, smitten by the beautiful, sensuous and enchanting career prostitute Esme (Nuriyyih Gerrard), he bestows everything else on her. However, she cheats and betrays him, leaving him penniless and despondent and he returns to the bush.
But Makantali’s good luck has not deserted him and though depressed and downtrodden, a dream leads him to an even larger find of gold. He is on his way to claim it, when his boat breaks in the rapids and he is killed. In the spirit world, he is given a chance to redeem himself, give some meaning to his life and end the recurring curse of all porknockers. To achieve this, he must find the right porknocker to give his hidden store of gold as redemption will only happen if the man he selects is able to tear himself away from the women in the bush, keep his new-found wealth and return to his family on the coast. Makantali selects McFarlaine (Michael Ignatius) who is involved with the comely but fickle Elsa (Makini Thompson) on the landing, but whose pregnant girlfriend is waiting for him in Georgetown.
Naughton’s production was ambitious and started off impressively with visual effects and dance choreographed by Campbell. Quite prominent here was an opening dance by Makantali, very effectively executed by Thompson, whose lead performance was quite good overall throughout the play. His dance led into the rest of the scene, setting the play off. Equally good were the other opening dancers who made quite an impact, except that the dance was simply added on and not connected to the play. Overall, in a play with tempting choreographic possibilities, dance was minimal and not meaningfully integrated.
The same can be said for music. There were drummers permanently on the set and several appropriate folk songs, but very little of this was integrated into the play. Instead, the music was incidental, filling the gaps during the long black-outs between scenes. While the theme song “Makantali Money Done” was a most remarkable and memorable rendition, the recorded music quite upstaged the drumming and any other live music.
The long scene changes contributed to a certain slowness in the pace of the play, whose script is lengthy. But most of the blackouts were unnecessarily long since they were not always justified by the magnitude of scene changes. There were many good moments with lively scenes, particularly with Mark Luke-Edwards as Captain Bobb. Luke-Edwards carried much of the story-telling narrative and was responsible for quite a bit of humour that occasionally spiced up the performance. Elsewhere in the play similar energy came from well-paced sequences with Ignatius, Frederick Minty, Paul Budnah and Naughton. These served well to break up the general slowness.
The set did not take advantage of the size of the stage. Ample space on stage left was under-used. What is more, there were attractive scenic designs and structures very appropriate to the setting that might have enhanced the spectacle but were not used in the action.
Visually, the set was sometimes realistic, as in the case of the shops – one on the landing in the interior, and the other in Georgetown, both scenically good and workable. It assisted in pointing the spotlight on the play’s setting. It took the audience back more than 60 years ago to when the great porkknockers reigned in British Guiana; a time that is admittedly not easy to recapture on stage. This production made a gallant and complementary attempt, but was not always easy to follow. The time differences and flashbacks that were not always clear to those members of the audience who were unfamiliar with the play.
Sometimes costuming helped, sometimes it didn’t, or might even have been anachronistic. Interestingly, among the most spectacular costuming was that in the spirit world, which was visually effective all round.
The choral speech lacked clarity with only the dominant voice of the chorus leader being heard – good volume, but no clarity, aggravated by the disruptive pounding of the staffs on the floor. Paradoxically, this, coupled with their reappearance at the end of several scenes, was monotonous and undramatic.
However, that was positively overridden by most of the acting in what was generally an exhibition of spirited performances. Some examples among the major characters were LeTisha Da Silva’s studied and controlled character portrayal of Beryl; Whaul’s full understanding of Lillian Barker through all her emotional vicissitudes; Gerrard’s depiction of the temptress Esme without stereotyping; and Thompson’s Elsa. In addition, Ignatius found the fortitude to play McFarlaine convincingly, shedding all traces of his usual comedic appearance. Thompson was consistently credible as Makantali and Luke-Edwards conjured up a lucid character type as Captain Bobb, perhaps needing to get away from the kind of roles in which he is almost always cast. Minty, Budnah and Naughton can also be cited for clear, creditable portrayals.
Make-up administered by Kimberly Fernandes and Latoya Da Silva helped in some cases to define characters and must be commended considering the size of the cast.
All told, Naughton’s production of Bascom’s Makantali has to be extolled for the brave effort and accomplishment in realising this Guyana Prize winning play on stage for a public starved of such plays. It will be lauded as a work of important Guyanese theatre, lengthy, but highly entertaining and educative about a chapter that existed behind closed curtains in the nation’s popular culture and social history, complete with the spirits and dreams that sustained it.
