It has become a cliché to describe Kathryn Hunter’s basic acting attribute as shape-shifting, but since clichés can usually be traced to inconvertible truths, shape-shifting is a description that gets to the core of any number of her mesmerizing performances.
The latest is Colin Teevan’s adaptation of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s packed 80-minute The Emperor, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in which she expertly executes a version of the old joke about a series of men examining an elephant from different angles and failing to come up with an accurate portrait of the actual entire mammal.
The man recounted is Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s long-ruling monarch, who was hallowed during the early decades of his reign for democratic leanings as he traveled the globe ingratiating himself with other world leaders.
Kapuscinski went about obtaining an encompassing look at Selassie from the height of his career to his downfall at the hands of Mengistu Haile Mariam by way of interviewing men who worked in his court in high and low capacities.
As a result, Hunter—wearing a greying moptop wig and a generic military uniform with detachable epaulets—constantly switches quickly from impersonating, among a few others, Selassie’s valet, a lowly menial, his bedroom manager, his zoo keeper (lions were Selassie’s favorites, possibly because he saw himself as a lion), his purse bearer, his chauffeur, a door keeper, his ceremonial officer, and his minister of communications. As Selassie’s pillow keeper, Hunter hastily prostrates herself, pillow in hand, so that the comforting object is in place before Selassie’s feet can be left dangling.
Dodging around under Walter Meierjohann’s kinetic direction and under Mike Gunning’s searching lights, Hunter employs similar accents. There she is changing hats and postures and grabbing the occasional prop. Three or four of the men portrayed are carefully differentiated from the others, while some are a bit less distinct. At no point, though, is Hunter less than shape-shiftingly persuasive. (Hunter has played more than one man in her impressively varied career, Richard III most prominently.)
It may be that Haile Selassie’s fame has faded with all but the population that remembers him from the middle of the 20th century. (I’m one who maintains a lasting impression of a commendable, celebrated leader as it was believed he was in the middle of the century.) One event that surely adversely affected his reputation is the 1973 BBC documentary Ethiopia The Hidden Famine that Jonathan Dimbleby produced and Selassie repudiated. (Videoist Dave Price projects devastating footage from the film.)
But if Selassie has lost his grip on historical recollection, this depiction of him as received from those interviewed may make the larger point that a complete picture of a once headline-getting man is less likely to materialize than an only suggestive incomplete picture. How do we know who he is (and was), and can’t that be said of many leaders, the myriad pluses and minuses of whom are challenging to assess?
Which implies that The Emperor could be more cogent as a generalized look at power and its changeability. It’s an examination of how the powerful gain, hold on to, and eventually (inevitably?) lose—even invite—their demise. It’s a microscopic gaze at how the mighty come to fall.
Adapting Kapuscinski’s interviews, Teevan has taken a liberty or two in the service of staging. At one point, after Hunter pulls a curtain in front of Ti Green’s minimal set, Hunter as ceremonial office hosts a fundraiser for Selassie’s planned development center. She even commandeers a ticket buyer from a front seat. Taking only a few minutes, the audience participation segment still goes too long and isn’t helpful in the least.
Hardly incidentally, The Emperor is and isn’t a one-woman show. Seated upstage is musician Temesgen Zeleke, who punctuates the proceedings with a krar, which looks to be a kind of lute. (Dave Price is the composer of the convincingly sounding indigenous music.) Zeleke is also called on to perform other duties and completes them diligently.
In Teevan’s program note, he writes that The Emperor “does not appear at first glance as an obvious candidate for theatrical adaptation for today’s stage or indeed for today’s increasingly feverish world.” He then goes on to give more arguments for the play’s being out of place. His intention is, of course, to set himself and Kapuscinski up as absolutely stage worthy. In little more than an hour Hunter, Zeleke, Meierjohann, and cohorts succinctly prove his contention about the multi-faceted good and bad nature of the globally powerful.
The Emperor opened September 16, 2018, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs to September 30. Tickets and information: tfana.org
