As his primate opera version of 'the Scottish play' returns to Scotland, Alexander McCall Smith talks about how his African experiences have led to a string of successes

Published on Tuesday 19 April 2011 11:47

YOU'D be surprised at the amount of opera going on down Botswana way. Needless to say, novelist and frequent visitor Alexander McCall Smith has a hand in it, as has fictional Precious Ramotswe (his best-selling No 1 lady detective), if only as an iconoclastic local brand name.

• Alexander McCall Smith

The centre of activity is an unlikely one. Called, rather grandly, the No 1 Ladies' Opera House, it is little more than a former garage near the township of Gaborone which was converted into a small theatre about three years ago at the suggestion of McCall Smith. The author - himself an ardent music lover and bassoon-playing member of Edinburgh's Really Terrible Orchestra - saw potential for such a venture among the amateur singers he had encountered in Botswana.

Could it possibly happen? Could it possibly succeed? The answer to both these questions is a proven yes, and as McCall Smith reels off the hit productions, you begin to wonder if Scottish Opera could learn a thing or two from a company that performs in a glorified tin hut with homemade stage, props and seats to capacity audiences of around 60.

"Ahmal and the Night Visitors went down well," he says, referring to Menotti's tuneful charmer of an opera; "as does Gilbert and Sullivan, which we do in a kind of Mma Ramotswe-meets-Pirates of Penzance way. We're now looking at Cavalleria Rusticana, which will translate well into a Botswana setting. But we'll stop short of the whole Cav and Pag thing."

McCall Smith's involvement is, by necessity, more figurehead than hands-on. The legwork has been done by locally-based musician David Slater. But it was a very special production two years ago - an opera written to a libretto by the author himself, to music by Edinburgh composer Tom Cunningham - that established a benchmark for what might be possible when you bring western music's most noble art form into an African township.

That opera is The Okavango Macbeth, which relocates Shakespeare's Scottish play to the animal kingdom. But what do baboons - the featured creatures - have to do with matters of regicide and the upsetting of natural order, you may ask? Are we likely to hear such fruity lines as: "Is this a banana I see before me?"

The best way to find out is to get along to the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh tonight or tomorrow, where the opera is being staged by original director Nicholas Ellenbogen with a Scottish cast and - for the first time - in a fully orchestrated version by Robert McFall and performed by his own ensemble, Mr McFall's Chamber.

As for the baboons, McCall Smith was struck by two characteristics he had noted while reading Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Chaney and Robert Seyforth, both of which he felt had resonances with the Macbeth story.

"Baboons are matrilineal, and they're the only animals we know where status is conferred from one generation to the next," he told me two years ago, when I attended a private "sing-through" of the opera in his Edinburgh home prior to the Botswana premiere. "It's as if the queen's offspring are regarded as princes just by virtue of who their mother is."

But it was by the strangest of coincidences that the opera itself took root. Shortly after reading the baboon book, McCall Smith was on a wildlife safari in Botswana's Okavango delta. Discovering that the authors were actually working on the opposite side of the river, he got a guide to take him across to say hello and experience what he recalls as "a real Dr Livingstone moment".

It's no coincidence, then, that the only human characters in the plot are primatologists, whose role is observational. Essentially, though, this is an opera whose resonances are very much attuned to the spirit of Africa.

Does that present a cultural challenge for this all-Scots cast, whose principals are fresh talent from Britain's mainstream conservatoires, supported by the all-student chorus of Edinburgh University's Studio Opera group?

When I dropped in on a rehearsal last week in the university music department, it was like stepping into the monkey house at Edinburgh Zoo; or a hypnotist show where the audience volunteers had been transformed, mentally and physically, into convincing jungle creatures, even with the minimal costume and props available at the time.

The man responsible for the animal authenticity sat quietly but observantly. He is Cape Town-based Nicholas Ellenbogen, a lifelong friend of McCall Smith from their schooldays in Africa ("Sandy was annoyingly smart at everything - except rugby, which he was rubbish at," Ellenbogen reveals), whose involvement with this opera, and with the whole concept of the No 1 Ladies' Opera House, has been symbolic.

"Nick came in at an early stage in the development of the opera house and laid on a whole series of plays," says McCall Smith. "Not only that, but to make it all happen he rolled up his sleeves, got out his electric saw, and built new seating for the audience, and a stage."

Watching Ellenbogen work with his largely student cast, I found that image to be entirely credible. He is a practical, pragmatic man. There are no histrionics; just quiet, simple words that leave his attentive players inspired, enthralled and in no doubt about what is expected of them.

Nor were they finding difficulty in dealing with Tom Cunningham's unpretentious but sharply-crafted musical score. I wrote after the 2009 private performance that the ensemble numbers were passionate and dramatically charged, though the more narrative passages might benefit from the additional colouring of an orchestration.

Seeing it in its embryonic staged context last week, albeit still with only piano accompaniment, everything seemed to be brought vividly to life. Tonight's opening performance, with the orchestra finally in place, will fully test that theory.

When it premiered in Botswana, The Okavango Macbeth was a great success in testing the appetite for opera there. "For the first couple of nights, we got a decent enough audience", McCall Smith recalls. "But when word got around - as it does quickly in these parts - we packed them in for eight days."

In his other home territory of Edinburgh, he's hopeful they'll be swarming to grab a little piece of Africa in the wilds of Newington.

• The Okavango Macbeth is at the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, tonight and tomorrow. The performances will also be recorded for release by Delphian Records.