The Last King of Scotland review, Sheffield Crucible: a solid but unexciting adaptation that never quite gets inside the mind of a monster
No stage version of the life of Idi Amin could possibly want to come anywhere near to capturing the full horror of Amin’s eight-year rule in Uganda in the Seventies. Amin’s appetite for theatrical sadism is the stuff of myth – he kept his enemies’ heads in the freezer and famously ordered the limbs of his mutilated dead wife Kay to be stitched back in the wrong places after she became pregnant by her lover – and he is believed to have murdered at least 500,000 people. He was a psychopathic man child with a fanatical belief in his own greatness – and he also provides terrific opportunities for an actor: Forest Whitaker won an Oscar in the film version of Giles Foden’s novel, adapted here by Steve Waters.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Gbolahan Obisesan’s production is marked by restraint. Waters beefs up the close fictional relationship between Amin and Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish field doctor who is given the dubious honour of becoming Amin’s personal doctor after he diagnoses a sprained wrist when the dictator’s car collides with a cow – you can imagine the punishment meted out to the poor cow.
At first, his duties consist of little more than helping ease Amin’s volcanic indigestion with the aid of a cricket bat – the man has a love of junk food to rival Elvis’s – but soon he is becoming a trusted friend as Amin orders massacres, plots to invade Tanzania, and nationalises British companies, much to the concern of the Brits who had initially supported Amin’s military takeover as a bulwark against African communism.
Garrigan, who turns a blind eye to reports of the mounting body count, is discretely asked by a couple of diplomats in white linen if he can drop something “soporific” in Amin’s tea, but the truculent Scot has no desire to become a pawn in the furthering of British interests. Instead, he turns communications officer, arranging press conferences (Amin likes to hold them in boxing rings or while dressed as an astronaut) and forcing a reluctant priest to officiate at Amin’s fifth marriage.
Obisesan adds swirls of local colour: early scenes swarming with dancing and Ugandan pop; the obsequious ambassadors fawning round the new president. Waters shoots himself in the foot by making Garrigan more openly complicit in Amin’s day-to-day operations without fully making it clear why, but Daniel Portman’s chippy, opinionated doctor at least provides him with a handy outspoken critic of British colonial influence. Portman’s Garrigan is also a morally wretched figure: a scene in which Kay and her doctor lover beg him in vain to perform an abortion is wrenching.
Yet forgive me for implying a ghoulish appetite, but this production is strangely unexciting. Partly it’s because of the formidable challenges of Amin himself – whose mood changes faster than the weather and whose cruelty is unfathomable. Tobi Bamtefa’s Amin certainly has the right pantomime strongman physique and exudes, too, a ghastly bonhomie. But the dangerous paranoia? That monstrous psychopathy? You don’t get much sense of that here. And while Obisesan rightly avoids sensationalising such nightmares as the torture chambers that lay beneath Amin’s palace, what he does show of it doesn’t convince: the problem with a mutilated body part on stage is that it inevitably looks exactly what it is – a prosthetic.
Waters is evidently deeply interested in complicity and collaboration on political and individual scales, but despite a powerful moment in which Garrigan is visited, Richard III style, by the ghosts of Kay, her lover and the dead priest, these ideas don’t feed through dramatically in a production that increasingly feels unable to keep up with its own story. Still, the final moment is chilling. As the back wall floods with images of skulls lined neatly on shelves, Garrigan regains the British citizenship that Amin forced from him but at the cost of his silence, allowing British “activity” in Uganda to be buried along with the bones.
Until Oct 19. Tickets: 0114 249 6000; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
