‘Aren’t you sorry you forced me to learn English?” If that sounds more like The Tempest’s Caliban than anything in As You Like It – well, don’t expect Cree- and Lakota-heritage writer and performer Cliff Cardinal’s “radical retelling” to resemble the original. Instead, it features Cardinal himself, performing and deconstructing the kind of “land acknowledgment” with which public performances in North America are nowadays introduced. To Cardinal, the ritual is a vacuous apology in lieu of reparations or reversal of the original offence. But, if we’re in the acknowledgment game – well, there are plenty of other issues around Indigenous life, and the lives of those of us in the audience, that could use some acknowledging.
What follows bears scant similarity to Shakespeare, only a little to theatre, and slightly more to lecture-meets-standup; Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette leaps to mind. Like Nanette, Cardinal’s show majors in making its audience as uncomfortable as possible, as he arraigns us with Britain’s history of genocidal violence, the feebleness of our presumed allyship with oppressed groups – and, latterly, with the discovery of the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children at school sites around Canada. He prowls the stage, wired, angry, cracking bleak jokes, as one disgruntled festivalgoer after another makes for the exit.
That’s understandable: this is a confrontational performance. It’s also one created in a North American context, that loses something in translation at the Edinburgh international festival – not least its audience’s stake in the “land acknowledgment” convention. Not all of Cardinal’s transpositions to the UK feel well informed. Some of his generalisations, about white prejudice and virtue signalling, rankle and feel cynical. His arguments take “jumps in logic”, by his own admission, that make them hard to follow.
But there are hard truths here, too, about the stubbornness of systemic subjugation and the racism inherent even in positive representations of Indigenous life. In any event, Cardinal seems beyond aesthetic or ideological fine-tuning at this point, and his As You Like It is less “insinuating with us in the behalf of a good play” (in Rosalind’s words), more howl of pain and anger. It’s an act of reverse colonisation, seizing our space and making it his own. It’s not always agreeable, but it demands to be heard.
• At Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 23 August
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