Space and Design

Notions of Space

The space in Seremba’s performance is extremely intense and powerful. It is almost unimaginable, as Seremba’s narrative of his execution and survival is a very unique one. Not many survive from a firing squad who’s intent is to execute.

By performing everyday activities for his audience, such as his native chants and songs, Seremba catches a vulnerable and genuine space in his life that the audience seems lucky to witness. The fact that the play is also performed by only one actor is another significant contributer to the idea of space as vulnerability.

Questions for Designers

Come Good Rain exists in a history of oral storytelling. How do we reflect the community experience of partaking in oral storytelling traditions in the design?
There are several different locations and times in the story of Come Good Rain. What design styles can be used to evoke and distinguish between different places and times while retaining the flexibility needed for the pace of the storytelling?
Rain holds key symbolic value to the play. What creative design choices can be made to communicate both the literal rain and the figurative meaning behind the rain?
In Come Good Rain one actor portrays multiple characters, frequently switching between different personas. How can we make these character choices clear without losing the severity of the tone of the story behind comic costume pieces?

Serembe is definitely conscious of his performance. Not only is he conscious of his performance, he is also conscious of the fact that his performance is giving him agency to reflect on his past traumas. There is a fundamental three dimensional aspect to Come Good Rain. An interesting parallel to this idea is Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, also known as alienation or distanciation.

This dramatic theory supposes that an actor must separate himself from its character, so that the audience may acknowledge that there are actually two persons on stage – the actor and the character. This is similar to the protagonist of Come Good Rain in the sense that the character is allowing for the actor, and the audience, to discover a new-found agency in dealing with past trauma.

While there is only one body on the stage, this one body represents many other characters. The audience physically sees only one individual in action, however the narrative forces the audience to imagine otherwise. The soldiers, the family members, the Ugandan legends Serembe chooses to tell.

Design and Post Colonialism

Sources outlining the design of the play Come Good Rain are incredibly scarce, yet I thought I would share some significant contributions to this subject that I managed to find.

The first is a review of a production of Come Good Rain at the City Arts Centre in Dublin, Ireland in the year 1999. It is noted that the play begins in darkness, “to the sound of crackling thunder” (Colgan). The designer for this production of the play did not waste any time in using the fundamental motif of rain and storm in the design. An image that was striking to Colgan was Seremba’s first entrance, as he enters the stage holding a single, lit candle. In terms of sound design, Seremba was “effectively assisted” by musician Bisi Adigun on percussion and vocal back up in this production of Come Good Rain (Colgan).

In an interview by Jason King, Seremba acknowledges the difference in Postcolonial thought in Ireland and Canada. What he says is intriguing as different opinions of Postcolonial theory can massively impact the designing process of a production. This is the exact quote from Seremba: “In some ways, one would talk about postcolonial Uganda as being synonymous with dictatorship, a kind of dictatorship which sometimes made certain people long for the colonial era. That is how desperate things became. In Canada, on the other hand, you are talking about multiculturalism or interculturalism, which is something new to Ireland. I don't think that Ireland has gotten to that phase yet” (King).

Another impressive aspect of the design of the play is Seremba’s choice to expose his scars from his execution to the audience. John Bemrose in his article “Delivered from Evil” from the Macleans Archives describes seeing Seremba’s scars as “livid on his dark skin” and the effect on the audience being that the realisation of the reality of the wound “shocks the viewer into a more vivid appreciation of Seremba’s tale”.

A final addition to this section about Design and Postcolonialism is a project that I discovered by fellow Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies students at the University of Toronto. The project is called: Come Good Rain: An Interpretation Utilising Technology, and it was developed by Henri Romel, Nick Feng, Büke Erkoç, Roxanne Converset and Boriša Bo. The students introduce several novel design ideas such as the use of a depth camera that captures the movements of the protagonists and “triggers different sounds” based on these movements. As one can imagine, this can create a stunning visually and sounding scene, especially the execution scene. In addition to this idea, the students plan to surround the protagonist in a “red rain fluid” projected onto the stage floor by a professional theatre projector during the pivotal moment where the rain cleans Seremba’s wounds.