What Country, Friends, is This?

At the start of Twelfth Night, Viola is shipwrecked on a strange foreign shore. Dazed by the experience, desperate with grief for her brother, lonely and vulnerable, her immediate response is to try and find out exactly where she is. “This is Illyria, Lady” replies the Sea Captain. It's not exactly the most helpful of responses. Shakespeare's Illyria, like his Arden, his Scotland, his Denmark, his wood near Athens, is less of a geographical and cultural location than a space for the free ranging poetic imagination to roam. At times it seems terribly “English”: Toby Belch is an overgrown public schoolboy, spouting endless topical gags. At other times it is pure fantastic exoticism: Antonio, Olivia and Orsino grow lyrical, melancholic and wild with the pain of love. Poor Viola: it's hardly surprising that she chooses to disguise herself. The answer to her question is not to locate, but to dislocate her.

I had something of the same feeling when, on October 14th 1996, I landed in Mauritius for the first time. The thing that strikes you immediately is how very confusing the identity of the island is. There is no indigenous population at all: everybody is the descendent of a slave, a slave owner or an immigrant. And there are lots of people: it's the third most densely populated place in the world. Officially the island is considered African, and there is a large black African community. But there are also huge numbers of people who trace their ancestry and culture to the Indian subcontinent; large numbers of Chinese, Phillipinos and other East Asians; a small but economically powerful group of Franco-Mauritians. On an overcast day (which October 14th 1996 was), you could easily imagine that the roads were English - the green signs and the left-hand drive are vestiges of the colonial presence. On documents and in schools, English is the official language. In the street and the houses, Mauritian Creole and its closest cousin, French, predominate. I ask you: ladies in saris speaking FRENCH? What country, friends, is this?

The multi-culturalism of Mauritius makes it a fascinating and a necessary space to engage in artistic work. In many ways, I have found that working there has helped to focus and to clarify many of the ideas towards which, working in Britain, America and India, I had already been groping my uneasy way. Because Mauritius is the planet distilled. Its heady cocktail of ethnic origins, cultural roots, languages, colours and creeds is simply a concentrate of the brew we all now daily imbibe. I look out from my London window: a black woman passes, and Indian man, two mixed race girls. We think we know what it means to be British, but I'm not so sure any more. It's roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, OK. It's also alloo gobi and curried goat. The Mauritian experience has something to teach us: to be British today, we have to acknowledge that we inhabit a global village.

For an artist, there are two ways to respond to this situation. One is to create a new art for a new culture. Dev Virahsawmy's work is the strongest voice in the creation of a new Mauritian identity through drama and the assertion of the lingua franca. But for me, as an English director, it was not really possible to work as he does, approaching the global experience through Mauritian eyes. My way of working in Mauritius had to be through the second approach: the re-visitation of myth.

Myth is the cement which binds cultures together, but it is the most fluid variety of concrete. It responds to social, political and cultural change like humanity itself, by reassessment and reinvention. Moreover, although we often think of myth as a definer of cultures, one of its most striking features is the recurrence of certain motifs all over the world. This is why a great theatrical myth like King Lear or Oedipus is not the exclusive property of England or Greece: things are being said in these great fables which define not simply Englishness, Greekness or Mauritian-ness, but humanity.

Often when people see my work, they talk about its inter-cultural aspect as if it were a sort of artistic piracy: the magpie director looting attractive gems from African and Asian coffers. This is to miss the point. To access another culture is, in a profound sense, to explore who I am. I sat in my hotel room in the Seychelles, and looked at the first page of the Gideon Bible. John 3:17 was printed in thirty-six languages. It was an extraordinary sight: but what was even more extraordinary was that, etymologically, I knew that all these languages had once been the same. On that page I could see the new Babel of the late 20th century, and a basic human truth about love and self-sacrifice, filtered through its confusions to emerge all the purer, all the more powerful.

This is why all three of the productions I have mounted in Mauritius have been re-visitations of myth. They have been mirrors in which I have been able to see myself, in which the actors have also reflected their own identities; and which we have held up to the audience to encourage their own self-contemplation. Paul and Virginie is an 18th century French novel set in an apparently pre-lapsarian Mauritius. It has become the island's great legend: statues of the protagonists are everywhere, even outside the theatre in Rose-Hill. In the hands of the wonderful Anglo-Mauritian composer Eric Appapoulay and a hugely talented group of local singers, dancers, musicians and actors; this story became an exploration of freedom in the light of slavery, of love in the face of prejudice, and of the uneasy relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. The sega dance, performed by a cast of sixty, formed a celebration of freedom, sensuality and emotion; set against the stifling morality of the colonisers' church. What was wonderful about doing this piece as a collaboration between Britain and Mauritius was the acknowledgement that, whatever the rights and wrongs of history, the colonial past and its mythology is an inheritance which we all share. Our cultures are bound together by the legacy of imperialism: our most pressing need is to understand how we can now live together. In the final song of Paul and Virginie, “Let the child be free”, we gave an emotional, if not a practical answer.

Macbeth was a more complex task for me. I felt that it was essential for the Mauritian audience, especially the students studying the play, that it should be given not merely a local colour but a local truth. The result was a particularly collaborative process. I knew that I couldn't tell my cast what the play would mean for this audience emotionally: we had to find it together. We began with language. Passages of the play were translated into Mauritian Creole (and occasionally French) to reflect the linguistic experience of the island. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth spoke English to each other, to themselves, and on formal occasions. Soldiers, servants and hired murderers spoke Creole, and were to spoken to in French. The child Macduff spoke Creole. The Porter spoke Creole and had his topical jokes “translated” to provide oblique comments on contemporary Mauritian politics. The witches increased in number from three to nine, with the same scenes being played simultaneously in all three languages. It sounds deranged: but, to an audience used to thinking in this way, it was a very immediate use of theatre. It also led us to extraordinary discoveries, to realisations of how the emotional truths behind mythic work like Shakespeare's are expressed through language and culture. Just one example. We were working on the first scene, in which there is the line “Upon the heath”. “Sur la bruyere” seemed a reasonable French translation. But there is no Creole word for “heath”. I explained what sort of landscape Shakespeare probably had in mind, and Smita (playing the third Creole witch) said that there was just such a place in the South of the island. It was called Macabe....... The feeling of the landscape reflects the feeling of the protagonist's name, and in the Creole word the two overlap. In performance, it was a moment of extraordinary resonance.

From this base, we were able to evolve a production which we felt gave the audience and the actors a route into the play without destroying its “universal” quality. We did not set the play in Mauritius, we simply made it recognisable to Mauritians. Macbeth wore jeans, a black pullover and boots, as did all the military men. They fought with metal pipes. Lady Macbeth (a burnished performance from Nisha Dassyne) was in a red shalvar-kameez. Duncan wore a cream kurta: Macbeth as king adopted a black version of the same costume. The witches found themselves old coats, African dresses, a sari..... whatever they felt helped them. It could all have been an unholy mess, but, because it came from a careful exploration of the play's artistic and emotional core, rather than being imposed by "design", it hung together, and achieved what I hope was an integrated and coherent vision.

The experience of creating these two pieces with Mauritian performers has been of inestimable value to me as a British artist. Returning to work with people from my own culture (whatever that is), I found myself more able to access their inner strength, their sense of their own identities. Exploring Twelfth Night, a play in which identity is in a constant state of flux, I found that the Mauritian experience had given me new insight. My cast are a reflection of contemporary Britain, and the contemporary world: white, Afro-Carribbean, South Asian and East Asian. They also move between genders and cultural roles with a chameleon-like dexterity. It's very freeing for a director to realise how easily you can do this.

The theatre is an empty space: there are no rules and there are no secrets. What there is in the theatre is a meeting of people, and so a multiple viewpoint. Everybody in the room contributes in some way to what occurs. And so it isn't my Twelfth Night, or even Border Crossings' Twelfth Night. It is an experience shared between the performers and the audience, which is unique in each performance. And that is why it was such a privilege for me to be able to take the play back to Mauritius, a country which had inspired me to create it as I did, and to feel the air in the theatre tingle with the invisible dialogue between stage and auditorium. Dialogue is what the theatre is actually about: it's the basis of all dramatic writing. People talk to each other, and so the story moves on. This is why the theatre can do the contemporary world so much good. If we open ourselves up to dialogue and to drama, then our story can move on too.

Michael Walling
London, 1997