The red nigger with "a sound colonial education" may be in a wheelchair, but even an imperfect viewing and hearing of the gala opening night of his latest play O Starry Starry Night confirms that Derek Walcott at 83 is at the height of his powers, as he declines in years. What the gala glitterati were treated to in this intense dramatisation of the nine-week menage a trois the Post-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh shared with a prostitute in the southern French town of Arles during the summer of 1888, is a meditation on the very process of artistic creation.
A poet known as much for his strikingly visceral visual imagery as his densely sinuous language, Walcott probes and mines the explosive relationship between the two painters, with all the fecundity of a Metaphysical poet elaborating an extended metaphor. If we are to consider the title of the play (especially in light of the fact that the huge backdrop dominating the stage set was a reproduction not of O Starry Starry Night but what may well have been van Gogh's last canvas–The Church in Auves-sur-Oise–before he committed suicide) then Walcott's choice of what is considered an icon of modern culture, as a frame for his drama, invites us to share in the lived experience of creating art (in any medium), warts and all, including the genius which can segue so swiftly into madness.
We are also alerted that this play, like WB Yeats' last anthologies, is Walcott's "farewell to arms;" a review of some of his collective works' most significant themes and a poignant meditation on the immortality of art. In the second part of the play Gauguin quotes a line from the Provencal poet Gerard Nerval's sonnet El Desdichado (The Unfortunate): "Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie." Those who know their TS Eliot as well as Walcott will recognise the line from What the Thunder Said, the fifth and final section of The Wasteland (another literary icon of modern culture).
Gauguin may well be comparing van Gogh's misfortune and lack of recognition with the apocryphally unlucky Godfried d'Aquitaine, a medieval lord also from Provence, famous for his misfortunes, to whom Nerval refers, but when Eliot borrows the line, he does so in a section which begins: "I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I at least set my lands in order?"and which follows the Nerval fragment with his own pivotal line: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Walcott has written of a Caribbean aesthetic, which for him is one of reassembling fragments, from the apparent detritus of the collision and conflict endemic to the colonial experience–which shattered and sometimes buried alive the cultural traditions and expressions of both the indigenous Amerindians and all arrivants, whether African, Asian, or European.
With a sensibility shaped as much by his "sound colo- nial education" as was CLR James' , Walcott chose to sidestep the morbid pathology implicit in Fanon's Black Skin White Masks ("Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? how choose/ Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?" /Betray them both, or give back what they give?). Rather than rejecting the language of the coloniser, Walcott (much like Chamoiseau in Martinique has done with metropolitan French) re-assembles, subverts with insertions of the Creole voice and effectively establishes one pole of the continuum of Creole poetics. Without digressing into pedantry, any reading of O Starry Starry Night needs to contextualise its temporal, geographic and aesthetic positions.
The play is a late work and while an aged Walcott may identify with the single-minded passion for creation which links his two protagonists, there is the play's subtext of a review of a lifetime in art: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." That the play is set in Provence, provenance of the troubadours, (prototypes of modern poets and according to Roaring Lion kaisonians), and continually references Martinique (as paradisal tropical trope) as well as Gauguin's Peruvian antecedents, adds further resonances to the drama. So now for the actual production, warts and all. Unfortunately, due either to first-night technical or human conditions, much of the dialogue in the first scene between Gauguin (played by Wendell Manwarren in his best performance to date on a Trinidad stage) and Lotte (Natalie Laporte) was swallowed by a stage set cluttered with canvases.
This was a shame, as Walcott the dramatist often favours the same kind of double-entendre smut and defiant irreverence as that espoused by our classic calypsonians and also the onstage Post-Impressionist duo, who like their Bohemian compadres of European modernism sought to scandalise and contest bourgeois notions of culture and morality, hence Gauguin's invitation to van Gogh;
"Will you join me in a tribute to the Arts?," followed by that familiar ritual of Trini masculinity–the public piss.
Although some of the repartee between Gauguin and Lotte was lost on the audience (though not Lotte's jamette-style baring her breasts), we did get the opening chorus of cawing crows (harbingers of death?) juxtaposed against Gauguin's memory of "the raucous racket" of Martinique's parrots "heading home in the green dusk" and Gene Lawrence's superb cuatro accompaniment, which punctuated the entire script.
The opening scene successfully establishes the volatile connection between the unstable Dutch pastor's son, whose early mission was "the evangelisation of the poor" and the "Peruvian prostitute" who insists artists are "workmen without visionary pretensions" whose objective should be "culture without religion." The tensions between these two very different men and artists (philosophical, aesthetic, homo-erotic, financial) are also embedded early in the verse dialogue, which is versatile enough to carry a range of voices and registers from Lotte's salacious "Most of my life is horizontal," to the lyricism of "sunlight moving across the floor is like a sail."
As the abrasive relationship between the painters is developing ("Do you think that being a genius means you have to live in a pigsty?") we are made aware of their contrasting financial, psychological and philosophical positions, which beyond the uneasy camaraderie, the puns and stale jokes, constitute an ongoing discussion on the praxis of art production and the artist's relationship with society.
The impoverished van Gogh finds virtue in being forced to paint on jute rather than the more expensive canvas: "It forces you into different techniques...heavier brushstrokes." Gauguin the budding sensualist dismisses van Gogh's "visionary pretensions," countering with the pragmatic "A hill is a hill, a tree a tree," yet the former stockbroker is not without his own delusions about the dichotomy between civilisation and the life of the noble savage, he eventually embraced in Polynesia.
Although disappointed to find that Martinique has been civilised to the extent that women do not go bare-breasted (surely a swipe at Eurocentric modernism's obsession with the uncivilised/primitive exotic Other, which still persists in some quarters) Gauguin declares: "I believe the future of art is in the tropics." The European palate and quality of light ("Slate-coloured countryside and plodding windmills") are juxtaposed against those of the tropics: "Gold dripping palms" with "these pale colours of autumn," which we can see in the onstage reproduction of van Gogh's early painting The Potato Eaters.
Van Gogh's incipient insanity and propensity for violence (directed at self or others) emerge implicitly in Gauguin's misconception of his brother in art ("a dove...but a powerful painter") and explicitly in the caf� proprietor Ginou's disclosure about van Gogh's purchase of a gun and then, when the Dutchman begins to explore his aural fixation with a psychotic bite of Lotte's earlobe, before closing the first part with his declaration: "I'd like to paint the wind," which morphs into maniacal laughter.
The second half introduces Theo (played with compelling anguish and frailty by Nigel Scott), van Gogh's long suffering but supportive brother who acts as an agent for both painters. Theo's arrival from Paris serves to heighten tensions between the painters, accelerates his brother's mania and develops the themes of madness and genius, artistic success, the artist's relationship with family and ultimately mortality/immortality.
Theo's financial report (sales for Gauguin, none for van Gogh) seems to send his brother into a spiral of religious mania. While both Theo ("his work is prettier") and Gauguin attempt to console him ("I'm a venal whore"), the news of Theo's impending marriage unhinges him: "Who will take care of me?" Theo's parting remark, "I believe in what you're doing, what you've done... Your paintings have a biblical authority...it's work of consistent beauty," elicits Vincents' sad but lucid recognition: "Thanks to you."
Theo's departure for Paris marks a change in pace, with van Gogh swinging violently between a frenzy of painting ("Paint the night, by candlelight") and psychotic episodes. A dying Lotte's return from Marseilles and her attempt to earn a train fare to Paris by entertaining a young Zouave colonial soldier provokes van Gogh into biting her earlobe, and a denunciation of imperialism ("Cayenne, Morocco, Martinique...radiance to barbaric isles, docile colonies...fodder for imperial violence").
Brian Green, as Vincent, convincingly grows into his pyschosis and presents Lotte with his own severed earlobe in an act of contrition/ redemption. His razor attack on a Gauguin, who attempts to comfort his "little savage" Lotte with the fantasy/infection of paradise in Martinique, finally drives away his fellow artist, who tearfully admits "He was a saint...but he wore me out...I have to go."
Those anticipating the style of lightweight, semi-risqu� adapted farce, which passes for drama in Trinidad may not appreciate O Starry Starry Night. However, those who have an interest in the life work of one of the region's greatest literary craftsmen will find much to engage with.
Walcott ain't easy and like his painter protagonists has devoted his life to words, rooted in the myth, memory, landscape, colours, voices of the Caribbean and in reshaping our collective fragments, often at the expense of family and friends. The brilliantly illuminated sky above now claims another shooting star and when you see the play you too will be able to trace its trajectory through life and into the immortality of art.