“The Emperor” is a must-see play in London. It packs so many trump cards into an hour: The award-winning Kathryn Hunter playing 12 different roles; a controversial story based on Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie - seen as a God by Rastafarians and an corrupt autocrat by others - and a parable with sharp relevance amid tensions across the Middle East and Africa.Last time around, Hunter was starring in another tour de force, “Kafka’s Monkey”: her educated ape capered between simian and human behaviors and proved to be an international success. Now she is reuniting with writer Colin Teevan and director Walter Meierjohann, who says the new show is based on a book called “The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat.”“Colin adapted this work, by a Polish journalist called Ryszard Kapuściński,” Meierjohann explains. “His books I knew and I read a while back when I was a student in Berlin. He interviewed 35 servants who served Haile Selassie and it is written from their perspective. Kathryn is a master of transformation and she is going to play a huge variety of characters. You don’t need to use visuals when you have a performer on stage who can do all that.”The book’s main principle is that the title character is endlessly talked about but never actually speaks. “He appears in your imagination and we are quite faithful to that. There are mini glimpses of the character - a slight straightening of the back or whatever - but Kathryn’s never going to play him out fully.”Kapuściński’s book is remarkable, says the director, but it should be viewed as a parable about power, not 100 percent historically accurate. It is an “Animal Farm” with lessons as much for the author’s Communist Poland of the 1970s as for Syria today.“People who actually lived in that time, especially people from Ethiopia, say ‘this is not our emperor.’ I’m sure Kapuściński interviewed the servants people. He also thought like a playwright, so he is making some scenes more poignant but maybe not so faithful to reality. When it was staged at the Royal Court [directed by Jonathan Miller n 1987] there was a big upset by the Ethiopian community and there were demonstrations outside the theater saying this book is just a scandal. Kapuściński is talking about democracy and power, and how power can corrupt and destroy people. What happens if someone who is ruling like Louis the XIV sees power collapse and what happens to all his servants who absolutely believed in him through the years? We have a subtitle, ‘The Trail of Belief.’ Suddenly, in the end they begin to question things. There was just one old servant in the entire palace with Haile Selassie in the last days before soldiers took him away. They look back almost 30 years when it was a golden age.”The piece is not pure monologue, because Temesgen Zeleke, of Ethiopian band Krar Collective, injects music. “It therefore becomes a two-hander and suddenly you are in Addis Ababa.“We mainly relate African famine to Bob Geldof in the 1980s, but in the early 1970s there was a documentary by Jonathan Dimbleby of dying people in Ethiopia. The famine is the big turning point in this whole story. The emperor was the darling of the international scene but this tragedy suddenly brought a completely different image – he was inviting people just to have big banquets of food while thousands of people were dying.”“The Emperor” is at the Young Vic’s Maria from September 3 through 24. The production will then move to Manchester’s HOME, where Meierjohann is artistic director.
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