Kampala amateur dramatics

Next week, we will be staging the annual pantomime at the National Theatre in Kampala. In an ill-advised moment of conceit and goodwill, I volunteered to write and direct this year’s offering, Robin Hood of Mabira Forest. In theory, this sort of venture, once or twice a year, should come as a welcome and refreshing diversion from the day-to-day pressures of work. In practice – and I have had enough experience to know – it is painful, stressful and frequently disappointing. This production is no exception.

With less than a week to go before opening night, the failures are numerous. As yet, we have been unable to assemble the whole cast for any one rehearsal. To some extent, with a cast of 23 amateurs, this is inevitable, but it is nevertheless hugely frustrating. The programme is not yet ready. The set is not yet ready. The props are yet to be assembled. The costumes are not yet ready. The orchestra has not yet rehearsed….. “Don’t worry – it’s always like this…” “It’ll all come together next week…” It probably will, but it is profoundly unsatisfactory and, perhaps because I have written the script, personally disappointing, as I hear my beautifully-crafted dialogue mangled in ways that I never imagined possible.

The show probably will come together at the last minute, once the adrenalin of being in the theatre kicks in. Robin Hood is a great story and it translates very well to Uganda. In brief, the story begins with King Richard (otherwise fondly known as Big King Dickie) departing for war and entrusting his Kingdom of Uganda to his weak and feeble brother, Prince John. John and the Sheriff of Kampalaham invent the system of taxation, designed to take from the poor in the name of investment and development but in fact aiming to enrich the ruling class. Robin Hood, together with his band of merry women, emerge as a force who take back from the rich and give to the poor. Mabira Forest, so recently under threat of partial destruction to create land for commercial sugar cane production, is their home. The story includes the obligatory romance between Robin Hood (the Principal Boy) and Maid Marion – and Maid Marion’s mother, the Widow Winterbottom, known to her friends as Booty, provides the role of the Dame. I am lucky enough to have some great performers in the cast: Dick Stockley as the Sheriff, Barbara Kasekende as Marion and David Griffiths as the Dame all spring to mind, but somehow the whole seems to be less, rather than more, than the sum of its parts.

Will I do it again? Never! Or at least until the memory has faded to create a sufficently warm and blurry mental picture. If history is anything to go by, I will be back in the theatre, tearing my hair out, in about nine months’ time.