nKENTEn Pages: Spitting Image

A mirror is a funny thing. When well considered, it is the soul’s telescope, a narrowing point, which allows us to focus on the details of ourselves. The intricacies and imperfections laid bare, we find our innards splayed out on the dissection table, illuminated.

In a sense, this is the gift of theatre: it allows a society to dance with its demons beneath the fluorescents, and workshop the canon of received wisdom, celebrating its elegance and wrestling with its embarrassments. Theatre is one of society’s most visceral performances of culture. Elisabeth Efua Sutherland: playwright , actress , director. Elisabeth Efua Sutherland: granddaughter of the famous Ghanaian writer after whom she was named. Elisabeth Efua Sutherland: assortment of contradictions. A waif blanketed in an intangible tranquility, she is sparse with her words. When she does choose to speak, however, her sentences pause for the briefest of moments, as if gathering momentum at the entrance of her mouth, before springing forth, fully-formed. “ The Accra Theatre Workshop was conceived because I couldn’t find a bridge between amateur and professional theatre work in Accra,” she tells me. Invested in nurturing local vanguards who haven’t yet honed their craft to the level of a national stage, Ms. Sutherland and her team of like-minded creatives made a decision to carve out a space for the incubation of ideas. “You have complete amateurs going straight to National Theatre, and of course they make a loss,” she shares, visibly rankled. The ATW serves as the bridge for this vacuum — a stepping stone to greater exposure, but also a home for experimentation and refinement. The ATW not only encourages artists to take risks; in a sense, they require it. “There’s much more beyond the typical overly moral, very didactic work that goes on… or the super-slapstick-for-no-reason-work,” Elisabeth says. The team has spent the past year spreading their networking tendrils across the expanse of topographic and diasporic Ghana, connecting with mutinous minds at home and abroad. This weekend, in its first production of the theatre season, a two-day event dubbed “An African Walks Into A Psychiatrist’s Office”, ATW is unfurling these narratives into at times unrecognizable forms. “Some of these pieces involve a lot of movement. I t’ s visual theatre. Very little words. Non-linear storytelling… Some of this, nobody’s ever seen in Accra before. People will not know that you can describe this as theatre.” Does Elisabeth flinch at the potential to lose her audience? “That’s… almost the point,” she says. Two evenings. Eight plays each night. And eighty seats. The formula is barebones and stripped. The work itself is anything but. “It’s gritty… It’s just a different approach to the form than you normally find in contemporary Ghanaian playwriting.” She gives the example of Jonathan Dotse, an Ashesi student who wrote a science fiction script. “We’ve taken his play and made it into sci-fi theatre,” she says, smirking. “It’s encouraging to see Ghanaian writers think beyond the living room comedy.” So, does Ms. Sutherland herself have a piece in this weekend’s productions? Apparently so. “My piece grew out of stories I’d been hearing about the morgues in Accra, where people get thrown in when they‘re not actually dead,” she says, beginning to grin. “The attendants don’t check the pulse correctly, then they send the paperwork to the doctor who doesn’t double check, and people get thrown into the freezer.” Isn’t that a bit macabre — perhaps, blatantly so? Her smile widens. “It manages to be quite funny. You have to decide for yourself if that’s… appropriate.” Clearly, for Ms. Sutherland

the limits of “appropriate” are expansive. And then some. Step into ATW’s offices and you’ll find a ragtag group of “players” in the Shakespearean sense, and a thick almost revolutionary hubbub in the air. The office is physically in Tesano (number 1, North Close, though don’t count on Google Maps to help you get there). In a metaphorical sense, however, ATW exists in some nebulous region of Ghanaian consciousness, neither too far ahead of its audience, nor dewy-eyed and sentimental about the collective past we share. If Elisabeth’s fulcrum does lean one way, however, it is towards yesteryear. “Ghana had such a vibrant art scene, pre-1970s. It kind of died. Part of that was the military action going on. But [as a result], we’ve lost the ability to criticize each other.” Critique is an immeasurable part of the ATW process. Each performance piece goes through multiple iterations, tweaks and even changes on the eve of the production, ensuring that the only rough edges remaining are intentional protrusions. What’s the point of avant-garde if it doesn’t trip people up? “Most plays these days involve physical imbalances or relational imbalances,” Elisabeth says. “The plays in this weekend’s production have to do with mental states that are imbalanced.” None of the narratives trot out neat lessons, wrapped tightly in ribbons, for the audience to take home. “All of these pieces read open-ended. None of them are too preachy or [heavy-handed] with the moral of the story.” While these pieces are up for interpretation, what certainly isn’t is Ms. Sutherland’s take on acting craft and the subtleties it affords. She has more than a handful of reproofs for the current state of Ghana’s thespian landscape. “[There is a] disconnect from reality, a lack of balance in regards to acting technique, where an actor is angry all the time or just shouting… It diminishes our human experience.” The result of this exaggerated depiction? A mental numbing. A loss of nuance. “We’re not exposed to subtle emotions and subtle ideas,” she laments. This is a problem if we hope to nurture a new generation of Ghanaians, one equipped to tackle the problems of a new world with critical thought and creativity at the ready. For Elisabeth, art cannot be dismissed as a secondary societal concern; our representations of ourselves arrive with too much at stake. And just as tragic, if not more so: the creeping sense that our images no longer reflect who we are. “We tend to caricature things so much that it becomes unrecognizable to a real Ghanaian. An average Ghanaian doesn’t walk around channeling Maame Water or screaming for no reason.” In a sense, the goal of the ATW is at once futurist and nostalgic; a return to the era of aggressive Ghanaian artistry and creative risk, tempered with a parallel and complementary thrust towards the unexplored and uncharted. This is, of course, the true power of mirror images: not only to show what is, but to show what could be. When well considered, a mirror invites us to become reacquainted with ourselves. The bumps, the bruises… life’s accumulated veneer of wisdom and weathered storms. Stare at the image with enough intensity, however, and the pockmarked skin recedes. Potential emerges in its stead. “I want [the audience] to start thinking, no t only about art, but about the content of all these pieces… and what that says about what we’re capable of in this country… without the influence of [the] outside.” The Accra Theatre Workshop dares us to consider ourselves. I suggest we take up the challenge.

“An African Walks Into A Psychiatrist’s Office” takes place Friday 1st & Saturday 2nd of October, at 7pm. Contact the Accra Theatre Workshop on 0245006185 for tickets. Look out for the unabridged version of this interview to hit the internet in December.