How NOT to write an Opera.
I was living in France making linoprints and lithographs. I got taken for a playmate by a creamy Rhinelander, Ursula, who sang out delicious, delicious as I plunged in on the Ikea sofa, a deliberate double of the one she had in the holiday home she shared with her ex. The season over she dropped me. I spent a night crafting a document — a pleading. My mind ran barrister smooth. I had never known such mental power. Useless.
Holed in the guts I did some charity work to rack up moral credit. At a book sale for Amnesty International I was invited to help myself before the public came in. Right in front of me in silver letters on navy blue was: Gangs & Countergangs. I pulled the volume out of the box and opened it at a photograph of a bunch of people posing with what looked like fake weapons. The negative had been scratched to black out the faces on the print but you could see that some of the people were in fact, well… black. They looked as tho they had dressed from a thrift shop: crumpled hats, raincoats tied with string and floppy trousers. They were posed like a corny sculpture in memory of something or other. Something in me clicked. I said: Opera.
The book was written by the man who took the photograph, Frank Kitson, a Captain in the British Army who had been sent to Kenya in 1953 to help the police deal with crimes committed by people working to free the country from colonial rule. He invented a method of infiltration into enemy lines by specially trained Brits and turned rebels. The photograph showed one of these groups. They were known as pseudo-gangs.
I went back to the notepad on which I’d written my broken heart pleading and began to throw down ideas. Somehow the hole Ursula had opened turned into a conduit. I read Kitson’s book and others about what became known as the Mau Mau Rebellion. I invented seven characters and then inhabited them. One time driving round the local industrial estate I became my female lead, called Muthoni, looking for someone to kill. Sometimes snatches of lyric, sometimes costume sketches went down on paper. The key image — Opera — still held: a melodrama with the cast singing out soliloquy rather than clumsy dialogue, something formal, stiffs moving. A first try synopsis began like this,
Jensen, a reluctant soldier is sent out to a hot land where fear has broken out. To his side comes Morris, a natural killer with a passion for broken cars and disguise. Morris has a wild lover called Muthoni who tells him about M’jagua who is willing to change sides. She conjures up the white she worked for, Marion who sings of her husband shot in her sight. Marion mourns over his clothes and passes them to Muthoni. Muthoni shows Morris the clothes and he tells her to take them to M’jagua so that he can be recognised and allow himself to be captured safely by Jensen.
How a writer self-limits the choice of form is their own affair. Write an opera? Down the line a kindly insider called Bill Banks-Jones said he’d never heard of a libretto that hadn’t first been commissioned thru a composer. I never thought then that I was swimming against the tide, coming out near the impossible end of the range. Didn’t worry me then because, by god, the thing was running, shaping up.
I kept at it. I had my characters and a storyline. I heard music sometimes and did sketches of the staging. Tho I knew nothing about the opera world, music had always touched the inside of my life. My mother was a concert violinist and worked nights. She would stand at the door in her evening dress covered by a tatty raincoat and wave bye bye. When I was fourteen at a summer camp she ran for amateurs I was cast in Mozart’s Il Seraglio. I played the deaf mute.
It was only when I had to do a cut-down version that I saw plain the autobiography that had driven the piece. Our home was Notting Hill: pre-Carnival, riddled with race riots. At night from The Latymer Arms over the road came the sound of Irish labourers singing their cash away. My teenage ear in the pillow was getting jazz from Voice of America’s this is Willis Conover. The programme was relayed by a transmitter perched on a hill near Tangiers where not much later I’d get my head blown by grass and wild girlboy wailing in the Kasbah. The November of the year the pseudo gang were photographed my sister and I would have stuffed old clothes with newspaper: Guy Fawkes. We would pram the spineless bundle to Shepherds Bush and stand by the hot breath of the Central Line exit to catch pennies for bangers, catherine wheels, roman candles. The clothes came from the strays and derelicts, the war shocked, the mad who came by our corner amongst whom were awe inspiring black men. As we tugged the lumpy newspaper carcass, some thousand miles south there had been the same tugging and pulling and stepping back to inspect fictitious representations — the pseudo gangs. And later on I would heft training dummies out from smoke filled drains. The thing of bodies soaked into the work.
When I’d done enough of a first draft. I showed it to a man I’d met at a bookstall at the local market. He grooved on it, he was a musician, music was his life. But he was also a family man and it was his wife with whom I clicked. They had a swimming pool and she would sit out by it showing her bikini line and tapping out a beginner’s novel on her ipad. She treated me like a dear friend. I became one of those lonely bachelors that gets semi-included at Christmas. Their boy would come to my studio and make terrific cardboard sculptures once a week. After some months the man and I couldn’t agree on what to do next. I wanted him to organise a medley of what he’d written so far so we could make a CD to send to possible backers. He felt that would threaten the integrity of his musical vision and wanted me to wait. I couldn’t wait — he had to spend too much time earning money to feed his family. We had a fight and that was that. The manuscript was now pretty dense but there were several blind patches. I put it away and got on with changing my life, now seriously in need of a re-build.
The new life came out of the clouds. I was housed by a svelte Frenchie. I understood what domestic felicity was for the first time. I took over a shed in the garden and cleaned and painted it out. But I was blind to lino and litho, my art gallery life had hit the rocks halfway between the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts — writing Mau Mau had bitten deeper than I thought. I unburied all I’d written: the solid block of text, the scattered notes and sketches, laid them out, re-sequenced them, dropped and added and wrote a second version. One of the clues in the reading I did was Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, transient pop-up social orders to fit a stage of change, new forms of life and organisation in the fighter’s forest hide outs in the Aberdare hills. Nomads making change against the settler’s order. I noted that just as the pseudo gangs disguised themselves as forest fighters they in their turn dressed up in policemen’s coats and gave themselves army ranks.
But where was the band? I was worrying my way too far into books. I went to The Composers Site and placed an announcement. I used the phrase … baroquely perverse with its roots in fact. I made contact with Rodney Clark the British baritone from South London. I conceived the smoke dream that the piece should hit audiences in the old colonies both for its use of different forms of the English language and for historical shirt-tail tugging. I posted off to opera companies in South Africa, Australia, Canada. I cooked up an opening phrase … a person like me can never imagine how busy a person like you must be.
Colin Mendez-Morris of Toronto ensemble Ars Musica gave me a master-class in how it is in the opera world. His email began … ok,where do I start. Tumbling around like that I hit The Literary Consultancy. I shelled out a special libretto price of two fifty and got a tick … you’ve written a potentially powerful and lyrical basis for an opera — the research you have clearly undertaken and your knowledge of the world of this libretto really shines through… but also:- get back in there son and carve that storyline closer. I dropped back into the shed and a third rewrite.
One of my composer lines twitched. A young Australian who just happened to be coming over to France that summer. I heard enough of his music to think it possible and his probing of the libretto was live and deep. We met by a Dordogne that flowed smooth between old stone banks, children dodged round the table where we talked, matching sun hats and beers. He’d conjured up some fragments on a synthesiser but I wasn’t convinced and told him so. He sent me more snippets after he’d flown back and I hung my faith on one, sent him some hard found cash and signed a homemade contract. Time passed. Then a strange thing happened. A friend from childhood pulled me aside and asked me if perhaps I could see a way of doing the piece as an art video installation. He had very good contacts in that world. He believed he could get some money. I thought that there was an outside chance of getting money to give to the composer to finish the score so I agreed. I built a new setting for the audience,
We are in a rather seedy airline transit lounge, there is one small window to the outside world, from the low ceiling hang bulky tv screens. There is an odour as tho the place has recently been inhabited by animals. At the center is an information desk with a figure who could be either an attendant or a guard. There is no information except on one wall is a sign: Mukurwe wa Gathanga (the tree where God appeared to man) below which a tv screen scrolls text. On another wall is shadow-paradox bust of Jomo Kenyatta on a chipboard pedestal. In a corner is a troublesome but useable 1950’s vending machine selling sour red wine, water and the sponsors soft drink.
I disassembled the text and re-built it, cutting by about a third. And it was while I was at this task that I found some of its springs in my hands. My M’jagua was also the middle class softie in the tough junior school who befriended foreign boys. The hearty brutality of the squaddies was some of what I’d met in the stinky macho of the fire brigade when I was a young man. And the lilting opportunism of Kioni wasn’t that also me as a bit part rent boy briefly flourishing in the circuits around Danny la Rue?
I didn’t feel comfortable in the public funding grinder. I had an exchange of letters with one of their monitors about me being white as in — what’s a nice white boy like you doing fiddling with these people’s struggle? Well, the history of this episode is also a white one: four out of seven principals are white and one of three chorus groups. So who has legitimacy to make an account? No-one? And in any case I’m not quite such a nice boy as all that. Sure, the key photograph in which the faces are blacked out for security reasons is provocative because of the resonance with blackface showbiz. In that particular case you had black people being blacked out because they had become turncoats and were working for the whites, suggesting perhaps a masked production. It was exactly that kind of irreducible complexity which political violence pretends to simplify that I wanted to bring out, each person having their own imaginary world which was prime and which made for potent ambiguity.
At the end of that public process some money did go to the composer and he is free to exploit his version but I had caught the tail of a better idea listening to Kenyan entertainers of the fifties and sixties like George Mukabi’s gentle guitar tracks and liquid voices plus what I got from ripping a clip from La chasse au lion à l’arc a Jean Rouche film set in West Africa: the Land-Rover gets a puncture, the wheel is on the ground and a man, call him Joe, straddles a pump, another man is squatting by the wheel and he starts to drum on the metal rim with two sticks, Joe starts to pump in rhythm with the drumming. Instant work song, the african gift of making time fill up and I wondered whether a score could not be built out of improvisation, chanting the text and having drums guitar sax pick up and into it. I re-framed the project as a summer school workshop and started looking for hosts.
Then I had my show-biz lucky break. At least that is how I understood what happened because suddenly, as pilots say, the holes in the cheese lined up and I got my thing on someone’s desk face up. Scanning the Guardian I had caught Opera boss shocked by whiteness. I zapped off an email direct to this top company and — saints alive — a reply straight away asking me to forward to the artistic director. After a two month sit upon they ask me to call them with a day and an hour. I call every twenty minutes that day. They apologise and re-arrange. Same thing. No contact, deathly hush. Show-biz. They make me feel like Hitler’s mother. Is my piece really such a monster?
