Aphra Behn's canonisation as the first saint of feminism was initiated early this century by Virginia Woolf in A Room Of One's Own. ("All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak.") Fifty years later she has achieved iconic status as Yvonne Roberts's "all-round bad girl".
Aphra Behn was born around 350 years ago, possibly in Kent, though equally as likely not in England at all. Even the date of her birth and her parentage remain shrouded in mystery. Woolf's assertion that Behn was the first woman to "earn her living by her pen", is probably wishful thinking. The theatre was a rackety place. As far as polite society was concerned actresses were only one step up from courtesans, and they were right. Only the top stars earned serious money and what better place to display one's charms and catch the eye of a potential suitor than the stage of Drury Lane? The more successful an actress's career, the more aristocratic/influential/wealthy her "protectors". Although there is no record that Behn ever acted herself, she was part of that world, where money talked.
Behn's status as a widow gave her a certain amount of protection, but there is no record of a marriage. What is clear is that she was always in debt and her life was a grim struggle against destitution. Writing was certainly one way out, although the playwright's share of the takings - every third performance when a show was running - was not enough to keep her through the lean times. She would do anything to get money, including working as a government spy. She wrote erotic poetry and was the author of 13 plays, including The Rover, possibly the most bawdy of all the restoration comedies. Yet the work that guaranteed her place in literary history was not written for the theatre, but in the form of a supposed true story, a length that we would now call a novella. Even by the standards of today, Oroonoko remains a blistering indictment of the slave trade. Although couched in the language of romantic tragedy, it pulls no punches, and its white colonialists are portrayed as evil, rather than merely misguided.
Oroonoko is based on Behn's experiences in Surinam, modern day Guyana, where she claimed her father had been appointed Governor, but who died on the voyage out, though no record exists to substantiate this. Only after Behn's death was Oroonoko adapted for the stage, first in 1696 by Thomas Southerone - as a restoration tragicomedy; then a hundred years later by David Garrick, this time as an abolitionist polemic at a time when anti-slavery sentiment began to intensify. Now the Royal Shakespeare Company gives us Oroonoko from a black perspective, with an adaptation by Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele. Aphra Behn's narrative portrays the eponymous West African prince who is kidnapped and taken into slavery, as a man whose nobility, beauty, bravery, sensitivity and general fineness of character surpasses anything society could expect from the most high-born Englishman. Giving Oroonoko feet of clay presented Bandele with his most difficult task, he says. "It's always tricky when you're writing heroes," he explains, "I didn't want him to be a 17th century James Bond". Bandele came to Oroonoko cold. Although he owned a copy Behn's novella, it had sat on his bookshelf for six years unread. Yet it is hard to imagine a more appropriate match. The kingdom of Coromantien equates to present day Ghana, and the key to the play's "voice", Bandele says, was Yoruba, one of the area's - and Bandele's - many languages.
"This may sound like a very twisted conceit, but in the first half of the play I imagined that they were speaking Yoruba, and I used the rhymings and colloqiualisms. It's a very rhetorical language and rich in metaphor and I remember stories that my aunt and my mother and my sisters used to tell me, and that's the language - though not the stories - that I use." Although Bandele was familiar with the style and form of restoration comedy, having studied drama at university in Nigeria, there was never any question of aping Behn's language, indeed it wasn't until Oroonoko was in rehearsal that Bandele read her plays. The spirit of her style, however - racy, sexually direct, counterpointed by lyricism - is still at the heart of the piece. "Although I didn't feel there was a ghost standing over my shoulder, I felt I understood her intentions. There is a real fury in her writing." In Bandele's hands the innuendo sexuality which is the hallmark of restoration comedy becomes more overt, and indeed shocking. As Behn had pushed out the boundaries of what was acceptable, so has he. "Death by fellatio on stage, surely a first." "I felt that she was really seriously ahead of her time. Maybe things have changed during the past 300 years and just now, at the end of the 20th century, we are going back to something that was already developing."
Behn herself saw no problem with taking another's work and making it her own. The Rover, her most successful play, which opened to a rapturous reception in March 1677, and was published that August, was a direct reworking of Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso or, The Wanderer. In other plays she lifted characters and dialogue wholesale, changing names, suppressing characters or sub plots. Bandele has done much the same, although there was no dialogue to speak of in Behn's original. Prince Oroonoko is no longer kidnapped by a perfidious white sea captain, but sold into slavery by a power-crazed courtier hell bent on usurping the throne, a witty villain firmly rooted in the revenge tragedy tradition. And in the Lady Onola, former concubine to the king, and guardian to the story's put-upon heroine, Bandele has created a woman's role to die for: a wise-cracking, loud-mouthed Gloria Gaynor with attitude.
"It took me about six months but the moment I found the language of the play that was appropriate to the story, the characters just created themselves." Biyi Bandele has written six plays, two screenplays and three novels. "Virtually everything I do," he says, "is rooted in some mythology or another. Not necessarily always African and it's not always apparent in the work itself, although if I was to try and deconstruct it I could relate every single aspect of it to some myth or another. I come from that tradition."
Oroonoko is in repertoire until October at The Other Place in Stratford Upon Avon.
