"ART," said Oscar Wilde, "never expresses anything but itself." He meant, I suppose, not that a work of art is without relationship to the world around it, but that only bad art depends for its effect on emotions that it does not itself create. And it is a good rule: art that relies on good intentions or on personal sympathy with the artist or on the fact that it has the right message, may have all sorts of merits, but none of them will be artistic ones. Yet George Seremba's extraordinary monologue, Come Good Rain, which runs at the Project in Dublin until Saturday night, bends the rule into a shape that is perhaps unique.
Seremba is not just the writer and performer of Come Good Rain, but also its subject. He tells, accompanied only by the drumming of Adesose Wallace, the story of his own life, and more particularly of his virtual death and resurrection. As a student leader in Kampala, Uganda, in 1980, he was abducted by henchmen of the tyrant Milton Obote. After torture he was taken to the dreaded Namanve forest outside the city, where Idi Amin's butchers had traditionally done their dirty work, shot several times with machine guns and a rocket-propelled grenade and left for dead. But the good rains of the title fell on him, clotted his wounds, and he emerged from the forest as a walking miracle, the only man in such circumstances to come out of Namanve alive.
There is, of course, an eeriness in such an escape, but it is doubly unlikely that the one that got away should be an actor and writer, with the skills not just to articulate his story but to turn it into a compelling piece of theatre. And it would be silly to pretend that the piece of theatre he has created would be the same if it was performed by anyone else, that the piece doesn't get much of its charge from the feeling of being in the presence of someone to whom a miracle has happened. This is one piece of art that expresses more than itself.
In this, it defies the logic of theatre itself. One of the things that makes theatre different from the art forms closest to it - literature and painting - is that it imposes a distance between the artist and the artwork. Novelists and poets can, if they so choose, present themselves directly to the reader. Painters can make self portraits.
In the theatre, though, the art of making a show of yourself has existed only on the fringes. Bob Ford, after he shot Jesse James, took a job with a repertory company touring the wild west, appearing at the interval of a play to tell the story of how he did it. In circus freak shows, people put themselves on display. But these are exceptions. In general, theatre works by making everything objective, so that even the most personal of plays is performed by people other than the author. This has been, and continues to be, the critical distinction between theatre and performance art, genres which have in other respects come much closer together in recent years.
Yet Seremba engages in an act of literal self exposure. We get to see the scars in his flesh, the sweat on his face and the fear in his eyes as he re lives a nightmare. His performance, though wordy, is overwhelmingly physical. He holds his audience through sheer presence, and that presence is constantly reenforced by the knowledge that there is no distance between the actor and the role. It would be possible to talk about Come Good Rain as a kind of high class freak show.
Possible, but wrong. Seremba the writer and actor are no less important to the impact of the piece than Seremba the victim and witness. There is nothing raw about the construction of the play. It works because Seremba's own story is played in a delicate and artful counterpoint against the story of Nsimbegwire, a folk tale like Snow White, in which a girl is buried in the forest by her wicked stepmother but rescued because her singing attracts the attention of a search party.
Seremba, too, holds our attention as much with his singing as with his plight. He transforms his own story into a folk tale or a myth, one that begins and ends in the simple ritual of a man holding a candle walking through the darkness. And he plays on parallels with two Biblical stories, that of Lazarus and that of Doubting Thomas whose unbelief withers, as ours does, when he is shown the wounds.
In doing this, Seremba paradoxically underplays the savagery of the story he has to tell. He mitigates its horror by spinning it into the shape of familiar structures of narrative and meaning. He creates a drama that is deeper and subtler than that of a man telling a remarkable story - the drama of a conflict between the human culture that can find songs and metaphors even in the midst of terror, and the ignorant nihilism of his would be murderers. The effect is to make his story more, not less, powerful.
IN THIS sense, Come Good Rain bends the rules of art but does not break them. It does express something more than art, but in doing so it draws on a deep, subtle and enormously dignified knowledge of art itself, reminding us that there are miracles to be found in the form, as well as in the content of extraordinary stories.
