A fierce, poetic parable of colonialism
Cake
Written by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, directed by Clare Preuss. Until Dec. 3 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson St. passemuraille.ca or 416-504-7529
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard is in the midst of an audaciously ambitious project: to write a play inspired by each country in Africa, 54 in all.
Including this one, seven have been produced and/or published, including Gas Girls and A Man A Fish, both of which were nominated for Governor General’s Awards. St. Bernard was also a finalist for the 2017 Siminovitch Prize.
This latest in the “54ology” is about Niger, specifically about the trade, both legitimate and backdoor, of its uranium resources to various foreign powers. One can imagine a straightforward narrative-based drama about this material: suitwearing men of various ethnicities meet in boardrooms and airports and exchange quick-fire dialogue about valuable commodities; clandestine phone calls reveal more nefarious dealings; exploitation of the land and local peoples is represented by a heart-tugging subplot most likely involving women, or men feminized by their lack of agency.
Cake is that play passed through St. Bernard’s fierce, poetic imagination and distilled into an intriguingly expressionistic form. The thoughtfulness of Clare Preuss’s production starts with the way in which it folds the land acknowledgement that’s now all-butobligatory in Canadian theatres into the substance of the production: the Ojibwe/South Asian performer Yolanda Bonnell, breathing deeply and audibly, recites the names of First Nations as a sort of incantation and then the play’s action begins with no evident break.
A connection is suggested between the Indigenous peoples Bonnell has evoked and her character Femi, who is caught in a master/slave relationship with the middle-aged Oba (Ja- mie Robinson), who on the one hand, is a figure of authority over her, but on the other, is desperately impoverished and peddling unidentified commodities to unseen figures over the phone.
And she’s not totally subservient either, holding Obi in a kind of eroticized thrall. Mabo (Tsholo Khalema) is a local young man, more economically desperate still than Oba, wheedling him to buy his wood carvings and sharing unspoken sympathies with Femi.
Early scenes quickly establish these figures as stuck in a deadened cycle of exchange and exploitation; this is a deadened, closed-off dramatic environment reminiscent of Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre.
An outside force arrives in the form of Aarif (Ash Knight), a powerful client of Oba’s who takes a sexual interest in Femi.
Periodically she goes to the back of the stage and enacts ritual motions in open oil drums, pulling out packages wrapped in gold.
On one level these actions and relations are cryptic: reading St. Bernard’s program notes helps greatly in mapping a real-life political and economic scenario onto them, and starting to understand this as a parable of colonialism, with Femi (the feminine force) as representative of the land of Niger, perhaps Africa itself, perhaps all Indigenous peoples.
The title can be read as a direct reference to yellowcake uranium, and also evokes consumption and decadence.
The play’s meanings are not there on the surface: audiences are invited to piece its significance together by taking St. Bernard’s and Preuss’s invitation to move through the words, ideas and bodies they put onstage, and through the feelings they provoke: mystification, intrigue, outrage, curiosity.
The actors match the text with heightened, stylized performances: they have identified physicalities, vocal tones and emotional states of being a few steps away from naturalism.
While the production appears to have been staged with a limited budget in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, all the technical elements (sets by Jackie Chau, costumes by Elizabeth Traicus, lights by Echo Zhou and composition/sound by Maddie Bautista) work together to create an atmosphere of intensity and increasing dread.
Some of the plays in St. Bernard’s Africa series are text-based dramas, more straightforward than this; another ( Sound of the Beast) was a rap/ poetry piece she performed herself.
They appear united by a sense of outrage at race-based inequities and a desire to open up questions about their origins and futures, in this case pointing the spotlight directly at colonialism and its continued aftermath. It will be exciting to see where she heads next.