It is the 1970s and we are invited to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s legendary club The Shrine. To get to it you have to cross through the most dangerous parts of the city of Lagos in an unsettled Nigeria where corruption and violence are never far from view. Once you reach the club you will have to queue with thousands of others, all resisting the army’s attempts to keep you from passing through the doors to hear what revolutionary Fela has to say.
In our case, firmly back in 2010, it is not quite so hard to walk along the Southbank to the Olivier theatre where The Shrine has been reconstructed, with only a handful of Christmas market stalls to dodge your way around and a few skateboarders to negotiate. But the spirit of Fela and his devoted followers is well and truly present on the National’s stage.
From the moment you enter the Olivier space it is clear that Fela! is nothing like the National has staged before. Colour bursts from every crevice of the venue and each eye-catching costume, paintings and protest posters hang from every available space around the audience, and fairy lights drape over the ceiling creating a circus feel to the evening.
After a critically acclaimed off-Broadway run, Bill T Jones’s production – with help from a starry list of producers including Jay-Z and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith – finds itself in London to tell the story of the musician, political activist and spokesperson for the people, Fela Kuti. After travelling from Nigeria to London and America, the pioneering musician returned home with a new sound that became the soundtrack of his generation. A amalgamation of influences from music he heard along his travels – African traditional music, jazz, soul and funk – Kuti labelled his genre Afrobeat, and for those unfamiliar with the term, Fela! provides you with an unparalleled musical education.
Most of your education will come from the multi-talented Sahr Ngaujah as Fela himself. Singing, preaching, dancing, jamming and saxophone playing, there appears to be no ends to the skills of Ngaujah, who embodies Fela in such a way that you forget he is even acting. With the audience treating him as the musician himself, his mere presence seems to whip up a frenzy as he narrates his own story to the audience with a mixture of rock-star swagger, seemingly improvised banter, soul and pure sex appeal. Breaking into songs that last up to 20 minutes, Fela conducts his band and stomps around the stage with passion, as the ensemble steals the show with Jones’s extraordinary choreography.
Although the revolutionary’s story is best researched before you take your seat in the theatre – the plot admittedly picks and chooses from Fela’s life story, not always delving deeper than the bare facts – the multi-media production tells the story through not only song, but flickering videos and black and white photos projected onto the backdrop, including images of Fela’s dead mother, rioting gangs and protesting crowds, creating an emotive experience that could leave no audience member unmoved.
Alongside a supporting cast including Melanie Marshall as Fela’s inspirational mother and Paulette Ivory as the women who introduced Fela to the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Ngaujah creates a poignant, fun, loud, colourful and awakening experience which is sure to capture the interest of a whole new generation.
CM