A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1 by Jane Plastow

Author:Jane Plastow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030472726
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This is the section where Tekle Hawariat is controversial. The rats represent the ministers of Empress Zauditu, and Tekle Hawariat mocks their inability to either properly understand or implement modern ideas of governance ‘from overseas’: that is, Europe. The playwright continues in the same vein, mocking what he sees as the ineptitude and disarray of Zauditu’s government. If he had hoped his allegory would enable him to avoid trouble he was sadly misguided. Zauditu was furious when she heard about, and possibly read, the play. She ordered all scripts to be collected and destroyed—an edict Tekle Hawariat only partially obeyed as he hid some copies.

Tekle Hawariat’s play is intensely ‘modern’, read European, in some ways, but in others it is profoundly Ethiopian. The writer’s modernising zeal is represented both in the form of play—a narrative divided into acts and scenes in line with those he had seen in Europe and written for a proscenium-style stage—and in content, advocating Western-style constitutional rule. The use of poetry and the animal allegory takes elements from both Europe and Ethiopia. Many of the classic plays Tekle Hawariat would have seen in Europe would have been in poetic form and qene was the most admired literary form in Ethiopia. The writer says he drew on Western fabulists for his story but the play is heavily influenced by the parables of Ethiopian Christianity. The choice of animals—sheep, wolf, snake and rats—is redolent of the symbolism of both the Bible and Ethiopian folk stories.

Finally, the way in which the play was produced was definitely Ethiopian. The playwright was also the director and his actors were schoolboys who would have had no voice in developing the play. What was all important in this theatre, in line with Ethiopian perceptions about the relative statuses of writing and action, was the words. One of the first European commentators on an early Ethiopian play, Lanfranco Ricci, confirms this view.In this theatrical production, the stage action was rudimentary if not non-existent, the characters two-dimensional symbols of collective nouns designating a class or social type or ethical concepts for names, not those of real people. All the force of the play is concentrated in the vivacity of the dialogue. (Ricci 1969)

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