From boy to man in a flash in the Lord’s Resistance Army
Image: Smart Banda
Daniel Nelson
“If I invited you to come with me on a journey, a story, will you come with me?” asks Okumu at the outset of Far Gone. Of course, the audience says Yes. But what a journey, what a story.
Okumu is playing with his older, stronger brother Okello in their village in northern Uganda when they are captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal rebellious fundamentalist Christian movement that erupted from a turmoil of politics, instability and violence.
Okumu is just a kid whose voice has not yet broken. “Can dis one even be a soldier?”, asks the commandant. “It is weak.”
To break him in, the commandant forces him to kill his brother. With that shocking act, Okumu’s childhood is obliterated and jolts into instant adulthood.
The rest of the short play shows him — driven by his brother’s spirit — being toughened and transformed into an armed LRA killer, culminating in a final Greek Tragedy-style twist.
This gripping drama is acted out by one man, who is also the playwright: John Rwothomack, Ugandan-born, London-trained, Sheffield-bred and -based.
It’s a bravura performance, and so is the writing, because though Rwothomack says he narrowly escaped capture on a past visit to Uganda, the play “is not about … the kid who was lucky enough to escape. The play is for the hundreds of thousands who did not.”
It would have been theatrically safer, more easily acceptable to audiences, if Okumu had been one of the lucky child soldiers who were rescued or escaped and accepted back into the society from which they were snatched. But no, says Rwothomack, Okumu’s story is “for the future generations who will continue to suffer the trauma the LRA has imprinted on them for many years to come.”
That means the audience must be able to empathise with a child-man forced into killing but who does not try to escape (not least because of strong risk of death if recaptured). How do people trapped in such a situation keep their humanity?
Also, at various moments the audience is asked to repeat the commandant’s comments and instructions. Such an almost call-and-response device emphasises his authority and involves the spectators, but in an after-show discussion Rwothomack said that some audiences in other countries did not respond. I resisted, too, partly from English reserve and partly because it made me feel made me uncomfortably complicit in the commandant’s monstrous and ruthless behaviour.
A superbly staged production that leaves you with much to think about.
Far Gone, £18/ £22, is at Brixton House, 385 Coldharbour Lane, London SW9 8GL until 21 February. Info: Brixton House