THEATRE: Macbeth In Pidgin English

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Nick Smurthwaite

LONDON, Nov 24 1998 (IPS) - In the past he’s been branded a lunatic and a genius but it’s doubtful whether actor, philosopher and solo performer Ken Campbell has ever been called a pioneer – until now.

Campbell, who enjoys a dedicated cult following in Britain, is seeking a wider audience for his latest show and worldwide recognition for Wol Wantok – a language he claims anyone can learn in an afternoon.

Wol Wantok means ‘world one talk’ in pidgin – the language spoken by large numbers of the inhabitants of the South Pacific islands. The language originated in the sugar plantations of North Queensland in Australia the mid-18th century.

Ken Campbell explains: “The English bosses used to import slaves from different Pacific islands so they couldn’t talk to each other. They all spoke different dialects. Obviously they needed to have an easy, common language in order to communicate, so they adopted the language of the plantation guards who were mostly Irish.”

Campbell reckons that adapted pidgin would be the perfect global language of communication, far better than, say, Esperanto, the artificial world language devised in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof.

“It’s got no grammar, which makes it easier to learn than most other languages. It took me about an afternoon to get the hang of it, “Campbell says. “My idea is for it to be adopted as an international lingua franca. Its bloody daft the world doesn’t have a common language. Esperanto is much too difficult,”

The connection between Wol Wantok and Campbell’s latest show is that he has translated Shakespeare’s Macbeth into pidgin, which translates as ‘Makbed blong Willum Sekspia’. A company of actors, all versed in pidgin, enacts the drama, while Campbell interrupts them at regular intervals with “useful” explanations and footnotes.

“It’s a huge improvement, there’s none of that iambic pentameter rubbish which is Shakespeare’s main drawback,” he says. “It’s much more fun. It’s like having one eye looking through a prism and one eye looking at the world. It doubles the experience.”

Campbell has been interested in pidgin since the mid-1960s. He has performed some of his earlier one-man shows in the South Pacific, delivering jokes in the style of a British music hall comic – in pidgin – to baffled but appreciative audiences.

He once visited Chief Jack Naiva, advocate of the South Pacific Philipanti faith, which worships the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Campbell says he was shown a ‘sacred’ coronation biscuit tin, dating from the early 1950s and, in return, presented Chief Naiva with a souvenir programme of his show.

Now he has been invited back to the Pacific Islands to perform his unique version of Macbeth. “Somebody from the National Theatre of Papua New Guinea came to see my production of Macbeth when it was on in London and he has invited us to go up the Sepik River in a couple of punts.”

But it seems Campbell may have to modify his script. The cultural envoy warned him that some of his translations were ‘incredibly rude’ – the translation of Lady Macbeth’s line, “Come Satan, unsex me here” translates into “Seten taken mi hambag” and could offend a few pidgin speakers.

Apart from Papua New Guinea and the Sepik River, Campbell’s tour will take in New Zealand, Australia, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. “They’ve all got tribal languages, but if they want to talk inter-tribally, they talk pidgin,” Campbell explains.

Ken Campbell occupies a unique position in British theatre. A jobbing actor for many years, he often appeared in sitcoms and soap operas, playing minor roles. On stage however the one-time scientist is celebrated as a world-class raconteur, clown and satirist.

To fans of his theatre work he is ‘worshipped’ in his own right. During the 1980s he was a frequent performer at London’s National Theatre, thanks to the patronage of ex-director Richard Eyre, one of his most influential fans.

“I’ve got a kind of nutty following,” he says, “I try not to look at them too closely. The challenge is always ‘can I get this lot going?’ Each night is infected by its own special excitement.”

He gave up conventional acting on stage several years ago when he forgot his lines during a performance of The Alchemist in Nottingham. Now he just makes it up as he goes along, or at least that’s the way it seems as he allows his fertile mind to wander from subject to subject, sometimes factual, sometimes anecdotal, sometimes pure fantasy.

“People ask me ‘Is what you do true?’ Well, most of it is. All the bits you wouldn’t believe are true, only sometimes I put them in a different order.”