Authors: David Essex
I will never forget our arrival at the college, on a warm night with a huge moon and students sitting talking, laughing and playing drums outside. Helen and I were given a tin shack to share and a Ugandan teacher named Celestine was to be our assistant.
Celestine showed Helen and I to our new two-bedroom home and lit a candle: as usual, the electricity was not working. I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a scream from
Helen’s
room. Freeing myself from my mosquito net, I jumped from my bed only to feel the floor moving beneath my feet.
Scrabbling to light a candle, I discovered that the entire floor of my room was a shifting carpet of cockroaches. Tiptoeing to Helen’s room, I found she had the same unwanted guests. She was not keen, but it is surprising what you can get used to, and over the coming weeks we managed to co-exist warily with our intrusive insects.
The next morning we awoke to a definitively African scene. The families in the mud huts dotted around us were stirring and making breakfast over open fires. There was the crisp smell of burning logs and the sounds of monkeys, goats and exotic birds. Celestine had kindly brought us a can of water from the well so we washed and prepared to meet our new students.
In the makeshift theatre that I had seen on my first Nkozi trip, thirty-six trainee teachers greeted us by singing an uplifting, sonorous welcome song. They were fifty-fifty male and female, with an average age of about twenty-three. I explained that we were to rehearse and perform a musical and they appeared delighted, even though I am not entirely sure they had even heard of the genre before.
Celestine had managed to borrow a piano from a local church so with Helen at the keys we set about the casting process. I had decided to choose ten clowns, including Jesus, and use the other twenty-six cast members as a powerful singing Greek chorus.
Everybody wanted to play Jesus, girls included, but I settled on a boy called David. Both he and Judas seemed to have a lot of potential, and after a long day Helen and I returned to our
grub-laden
hut far more confident and less apprehensive about the task ahead.
Our domestic life soon settled down into a routine of me doing the cooking, Helen washing the dishes and my tinny transistor radio crackling out the BBC World Service. On one of the few nights that the electricity worked, I left our outside light on for the convenience of the family in the nearest hut. Woken by laughter at three in the morning, I looked through the window to see our neighbours gathered around this outside light, feasting on the flying ants that had been attracted to it. Apparently they were a good source of protein and quite the local delicacy.
During the days, Helen worked tirelessly to teach our willing cast the songs from
Godspell
as I tutored the principal cast members. It was a very emotional process for me, both for the flood of memories of my days in Chalk Farm that it brought back and because the African actors were growing in confidence and into their roles. I certainly tried to be a more proactive director than John-Michael Tebelak.
It soon became clear to me that these Ugandans were natural storytellers and performers. If anything, my role was to try to prevent them from over-acting wildly and turning every scene into an over-the-top melodrama.
Some ladies from the village helped with the costumes and a local carpenter constructed the rudimentary set of planks and sawhorses. The nearby shop gave us a plastic bottle crate for the crucifixion. Occasionally I would take a break to organise other workshops or coach football sessions with some footballs I had persuaded West Ham kindly to donate to the trip.
The cast’s sense of camaraderie reminded me of the us-against-the-world attitude we had nurtured in the Roundhouse all those years ago, and by the time of the first show we were ready. The audience was made up of other students, locals, doctors and nuns from the local hospital, and VSO volunteers from other Kampala projects.
We were to play three nights at the college theatre and they were a triumph. I was so proud of my cast on the opening night and the audience were moved to tears by the crucifixion scene just as they had been in London. Absolute troupers, the actors even survived the sticky moment when a goat decided to join them on stage and butted and baa-ed its way through the Greek chorus.
We had got a touring itinerary, of sorts, with a date lined up at another local college and then the big time: the National Theatre in Kampala. I had booked a truck to transport the cast and set to the next venue, but when it had not arrived two hours after it was due, I stopped putting it down to usual lackadaisical African time-keeping and started getting worried.
Celestine vanished to the local hospital to make a phone call and returned to confirm that the truck had broken down and would not be making an appearance today. ‘Does anybody else have a truck?’ I asked him. ‘Not that I know,’ he replied. I left the cast happily playing football and headed into Kampala to try to find a solution.
Passing a construction site, I spotted some builders emptying sand from an extremely beaten-up truck. ‘I want to borrow your truck,’ I told them, and while their initial reaction appeared to
be
that I must be mental, some cold hard cash helped to change their minds and I headed back to Nkozi with my prize.
The
Godspell
cast cheered as I chugged on to campus in a cloud of black smoke and we loaded up the piano, set and actors and set off for the outskirts of Kampala. The journey was quite something. With somebody else taking over driving duties, I transferred to the piano stool on the back of the open truck and resolved to teach the students Ben E King’s ‘Stand By Me’ en route. With the rich voices of thirty-six Africans intoning a tribal-sounding version of this Tamla Motown classic as a long-haired white guy bashed at the keys, we were certainly a sight to stop the traffic.
The show was at a rival college to Nkozi, which meant that the cast were both nervous and determined to put on a great performance. This was easier said than done as two or three of them had got malaria, and one female clown was too ill to perform and was replaced by her understudy.
Adversity can be a great motivating force and to my delight the cast ratcheted their performance up another notch with both Jesus and Judas on spellbinding form. The audience transformed from too-cool-for-school to transfixed and then tearful, and as the company bedded down in a borrowed dormitory that night, there was much excited talk about hitting the big time with the National Theatre show the following night.
Yet this show looked to be ill-starred when we arrived at the theatre to be told that the stage manager was away for the day at a funeral. This being Africa, he had no assistant and the theatre managers had not thought to provide anybody else to
help
us. We would have to work the lights, the sound system and just about everything else ourselves.
The technical rehearsal was understandably slow-going as Helen, Celestine and I pushed buttons and twiddled knobs on the National Theatre’s fairly rudimentary production console. I found a big ladder and vanished up to the ceiling to set the lights. The students were restless but patiently did what had to be done before show time.
In the dressing room, I gave them a football-manager-style pep talk, pointing out that it was by far the biggest show to date and they had to rise to the occasion. However, I was only too aware that this also applied to me as I tried to keep the technical aspects of the performance afloat.
I even had to ring the bar bell to summon the audience into the auditorium, at which point it became clear they were of a very different calibre to the previous shows. Here were Kampala’s glitterati, together with senior representatives of VSO, consulates and various other aid organisations.
I had kept the lighting low as John the Baptist opened the show by entering through the auditorium to baptise Jesus so that when the clowns burst into ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord’ there would be an explosion of light and colour. It worked, and from there the audience were with us all the way.
It was hard for me to evaluate individual performances as I hunched over the unfamiliar lights and sound switches but the cacophony of clapping at the curtain call told its own story. The British Consulate invited us to a post-show reception in their honour and as my jubilant cast nibbled canapés in the palatial
grounds,
I knew it was an experience they would never forget. That went for me as well.
The National Theatre were so taken with our
Godspell
that they asked us to play for a week and after the stage manager returned I was able to sit back and enjoy the subsequent performances. It was also nice for Helen and I to get out of Cockroach City and have a week in the VSO compound in Kampala that boasted twentieth-century luxuries such as electricity and running water.
This last week was great fun but contained yet another lesson that I need to do something about my pesky need for speed. Driving a jeep with a VSO volunteer in the passenger seat, my accelerator foot grew itchy as we crawled along behind a very slow-moving Ugandan Army jeep full of soldiers. I pulled out to overtake them, at which point the soldiers all levelled their guns at me and the volunteer quickly grabbed the steering wheel and diverted us down a dirt road. He then patiently explained the Ugandan Highway Code: if you overtake a military vehicle, they will shoot you.
Helen and I had the most emotional departure imaginable from Uganda. We travelled back to Nkozi to say goodbye to all of our friends, and to the cockroaches, then were driven to the airport. As we waited to board the plane at Entebbe, Helen pointed out of the window and simply said, ‘Look!’
Our students were ranging the airport’s perimeter fence, holding signs declaring ‘COME BACK SOON’ and ‘WE LOVE YOU’ and waving furiously. They had walked more than twenty miles to do this and it made me feel both awed and humbled.
Twenty years on, I still receive occasional letters from the Nkozi class of ’92. Most of them have now become teachers, although a couple of the girls became nuns. I will also never forget the biggest compliment of all, paid to me by the boy who played Judas: ‘You are a white man with an African soul.’
I made numerous other trips with the VSO including a jaunt to Grenada in the Caribbean, which has a high incidence of mental illness, and also to Malawi, where I managed to contract Tick Typhus fever and on my return spent a few days in a state of mild delirium in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in King’s Cross. I also played a fund-raising concert at the Barbican that was attended by the Duke of Edinburgh, who took a definite shine to Verity backstage and had a long chat with her.
Despite my initial reservations, I found my work with the VSO so fulfilling that I even extended my tenure as ambassador to three years, only reluctantly handing over the baton in 1993 to Olympic gold medal javelin-thrower Fatima Whitbread. It had been absolutely one of the most rewarding adventures of my entire life.
OUTSIDE OF THE
VSO, as the nineties dawned I chose my work projects carefully and selectively. With Verity, in particular, and Danny having been born at the height of the hysteria of Essex Mania, there had inevitably been times when I had to be away from home for longer than I wanted as they were growing up. I had missed a handful of crucial formative moments in their childhood developments and I was not going to make the same mistake again.
So outside of my trips to Africa, I made sure that my work schedule always left me plenty of time to zoom back across the Atlantic and hang out with Carlotta, Kit and Bill in Connecticut, as well as spend quality time with Verity and Dan in London. It was a busy period but a happy one.
One film offer appealed immediately to my subversive, slightly twisted sense of humour. A Japanese film company contacted us asking me to play an evil duke, Don Pedro, in a ninja movie called
Shogun Mayeda
. By now a teenage martial arts fan, Dan was hugely impressed as its star, Sho Kosugi, was a legend in that field.
Sho apparently wanted me because he had enjoyed my Che in
Evita
so I flew to Hollywood to meet him. The script seemed lively, my scenes would be shot in Yugoslavia and I fancied being a bad guy for a change, so I agreed to do it.
Yugoslavia was about to be no more, of course, and when I flew out to Belgrade in 1992 you could sense the ethnic tensions and general unrest that were soon to lead to civil war. Even within the film unit there was a degree of suspicion and contempt between workers from different areas of the Balkans.
We filmed in Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Montenegro, which were all beautiful, although some of the local customs were not to my liking. In Montenegro, near to the border with Albania, I saw a gypsy with a dancing bear, although the bear’s gyrations were clearly mainly to try to alleviate the pain of being led around via a hook that its handler had viciously twisted into its lip.
As well as being its star ninja, Sho was also one of the film’s producers, and
Shogun Mayeda
was a proper martial-arts action movie and very physical to shoot. Its team of Japanese fight co-ordinators spoke absolutely no English and so as they taught me the fight sequences, we had no choice but to develop a whole new language to describe the moves.
This bizarre argot sounded as if it belonged between the pages of a comic book as it mostly consisted of childish phrases such as ‘Ka-Boom!’ or ‘Whoosh!’ Sometimes during filming, I had to stop a scene to politely enquire of my tutors whether they required a ‘Ka-Boom!’ or a ‘Whoosh!’
The movie’s director was very old and inanimate and in truth didn’t entirely seem to know what he was doing, and the whole
project’s
surreal air was heightened by the fact that the cast also included Christopher Lee, the venerable and veteran actor best known for playing Dracula in a stream of old black-and-white Hammer Horror films.
Christopher Lee was charm personified and quite possibly saved my sight after a fairly dreadful mishap on the set. The scene we were shooting required Don Pedro and his gang of evil Spanish cohorts to fire muskets at our Japanese foes, and I guess I should have taken heed when the towering Serbian special effects guy materialised on set covered in numerous burns and bandages.