UNCLE TOM’S WAR: Haiti and the Whipping Machine, The Water Rats
The Camden Fringe Interviews keep coming! We will be publishing them every day throughout July. You can find all the currently published interviews here.
What’s always amazing about Camden Fringe is the sheer range of themes of the work being presented. Theatre should always be about enjoyment, but there’s no harm learning something new along the way. Which would seem just what you’ll get if you get along to see David Lee Morgan‘s UNCLE TOM’S WAR: Haiti and the Whipping Machine when it plays for just the one performance on 29 July at The Water Rats. The show will no doubt teach us more about the Haitian Revolution than we know right now (which to be honest is not that much!). But before the show, we caught up with David to find out more about the show.
What can audiences expect from the show?
47 minutes of passionate, absorbing, intellectually challenging performance poetry. It’s the story of one of the most important but too little known revolutions in modern history, the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804, told in the context of the American and French Revolutions and the worldwide war against slavery.
Is Camden Fringe going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
An earlier draft of the show was performed last year at the Morecambe Fringe. It got a 5 star review, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. I thought there was more to learn from this world changing event, and I’ve spent the last year trying to get deeper into what it meant, what it accomplished, how it changed the world, and how we can apply the lessons of this revolution to our own terrible situation with fascism on the rise worldwide.
What was your inspiration behind the show?
My first inspiration came from the novel, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, two things in particular:
1. It was a long, complex, Dicken’s style novel, written by a white, middle class woman from the North, telling the story of slavery from the point of view of the enslaved, but placing it in the context of Northern as well as Southern betrayal. What right did she have to tell the story of the enslaved?
But the impact of the book was incalculable. It sold more copies in the 19th century than any other English language book in the world with the possible exception of the Bible. There is a famous, probably apocryphal, story that nevertheless expressed a truth about the book: when she met Abraham Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War, the first thing he said was, “So you’re the lady who started this war!”
2. Uncle Tom, the fictional hero of the book, was nothing like the sellout, ‘Stepin Fetchit’ type character he came to symbolize during the Sixties. He was a strong, intelligent, resourceful ‘manly’ man, who died bravely, because he refused to betray his enslaved sisters. Because the book was so popular, it was reprised over and over again on Broadway, in Vaudeville and elsewhere, each time, the character of Uncle Tom was rewritten by playwrights and actors, and degraded by their prejudices.
How long have you been working on the play?
Over two years, performing parts of it as they were written, mostly in London, but also in other parts of the world as I travelled with different shows.
Is this version how you originally envisioned it or has it changed drastically since you first put pen to paper?
It’s nothing like what I envisioned at the start. It’s mostly not even about the same subject. As I studied the events that led up to the Civil War, I learned more about John Brown, the man who led the armed attack on Harpers Ferry that was credited with being the final spark that ignited the Civil War.
He’s portrayed in US history books as a fanatic, a bloodthirsty, fundamentalist Christian madman. He was a fundamentalist Christian, but his reading of the Bible led him to believe passionately in equal rights not just for enslaved men, but for all women and for all the native peoples who were being murdered and driven from their lands.
He was greatly admired by both Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, in turn, was inspired by the Haitian Revolution and by the man he considered to be its greatest leader, Toussaint Louverture. This led me to BLACK JACOBINS, by CLR James, a wonderful book that inspired me to a long journey of reading and writing and reading and re-writing.
How important is audience interaction to you?
It’s not a show that invites or wants audience participation, but I learn from every performance. I see when I’ve captured attention and when I’ve lost it. I talk, discuss, argue with and listen to as many people as I can before and after every show. I follow a formula that came from the Cultural Revolution in China: unity-struggle-unity. I am writing for a progressive audience. I look for points of disagreement – not for sensationalism – but so that together we can get to a deeper understanding and greater unity.
Are there any plans for what comes next after the show has finished its run – for you or the show?
Are there any plans for what comes next after the show has finished its run– for you or the show
Edinburgh is next: theSpace, Aug 11-16 14:05 (50 mins)
Then in Sept/Oct in the United States.
In January of next year, I’m hoping to perform it in Kolkata and – conditions permitting – Bangladesh. I recently had my translation and performance of BIDROHI (the Rebel) go viral on Facebook, seriously viral, to millions of people, mostly in that part of the world. It’s an amazing and greatly loved poem by the national poet of Bangladesh, Kazi Nazrul Islam. It’s a 7+ minute battle rap poem written in 1921 in Kolkata in a single night.
Nazrul is deeply loved, both for his poetry, and for his fierce stand for his people and against British Imperialism. A lot of his adult life was spent in prison. Here’s a couple links, the Facebook version that went viral and the full length version, edited and put on YouTube after the fact.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received during your career, and how has it influenced your work on this show?
My first love was drawing and painting. When I was about twelve, my dad took me to an art gallery in the big city (Seattle 🙂) and we met an artist whose paintings were on display. Dad said, “My son’s an artist. Do you have any advice for him?” And the artist said to me, “Yes. This is very important. Never forget this: have fun!”
What words of advice/encouragement would you give anyone thinking about doing Camden Fringe next year?
Work hard. Have fun.
Thanks to David for sharing this with us. You can catch UNCLE TOM’S WAR: Haiti and the Whipping Machine when it plays at The Water Rats on 29 July.
