just as he’s cogitating on the relationship between sexuality and sartoriality, he’s collared by ‘Chairman Mao Sylvester’, with whom he is cordial
at best
they’ve known each other since Amma introduced them at a party at her palatial King’s Cross squat back in the day
when they were both young and beautiful and spent their weekends tripping on poppers and ecstasy and wearing nowt but leather hot pants and cowboy boots while dancing away under glitter balls to the pumping disco beats at Heaven before disappearing into the darker recesses of the Cellar Bar to satisfy their incorrigible cravings
even with each other
although once was enough because Sylvester shouting Take that, Maggie T! at the point of ejaculation was quite off-putting
Roland was one of the lucky hedonists to survive El Diablo which swooped in to kill so many of them
so many deaths ruined any sense of nostalgia, sadly, remembering the past also meant
remembering the
dead
grumpy old Sylvester is a survivor, too
resentfully admits that the play is Amma’s best work yet, it’s such a shame she’s colluded with them, them, he points an enfuried finger at the Boring Suits, as he calls them, who line the party’s perimeter, the representatives of the multinationals who beef up the theatre’s finances with sponsorship, who stand apart, smiling awkwardly, desperate to be part of the luvvie fun
Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!
Roland marvels that Sylvester has managed to make a prolonged stab at capitalistic corporate culture and the Tories within a minute of saying hello
it might just be a record
now it’s his turn
The Last Amazon of Dahomey is a tour de force, he says, although I would never use such a cliché, you understand, when talking about it on Channel 4 News and the BBC’s Front Row tomorrow, rubbing it in because Sylvester has never acknowledged the superb success Roland has made of his career
has probably never read a single one of his books and never told him he’s seen him on the telly, when people often tell Roland they saw him on the box just the other day
it’s wilful avoidance on Sylvester’s part
and very undermining
the play is indeed ground-breaking, Roland continues, in spite of the fact that Sylvester appears to be more interested in grabbing the free prosecco in elegant flutes being passed around by waiters and knocking them back in one go before coming up for air
Amma, Roland says, could have paid homage to the original Amazons who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks, according to mythology, and who the Benin, i.e. Dahomeyan Amazons, were compared to by adventurers of the West who travelled to Africa and wrote about their fearless ferocity over a period of one hundred and fifty years
perhaps the play could also have employed even more techno-dramatic devices in its production such as holograms of the original Amazons of Greek myth hovering as peripheralized spectres counterpointing the main drama thereby adding a more classical relevancy to its thesis? and while the myth that the real Amazons cut off their breasts to better fight the Greeks with ye olde bow and arrow cannot be proved, we do know that such women warriors existed in the region, courtesy of recent DNA testing and other forms of bio-archaeological analysis of the nomadic Scythian kurgans (burial mounds to the layman), which have revealed the historical presence of warrior horsewomen who lived in small tribes from the Black Sea all the way to Mongolia, although none had amputated breasts
furthermore, according to Herodotus, the Amazons of myth gathered herb intoxicants, threw them on to the camp fire, inhaled the smoke and got high as a kite, so do you see how Amma missed a trick here by not playing around with the source material? nevertheless, as for the wash of images projected on to the stage making it appear to be filled with thousands of dead Benin Amazons stampeding towards the audience brandishing weaponry and uttering war cries
it was terrifyingly realistic and without doubt a coup de théâtre
Roland pauses, he’s done his research pre-performance so he can pontificate about it post-performance
before he can round off his disquisition, Sylvester lays a hand on his arm and says, I’m not one of your star-struck students, Roland, and stalks off, empty flute leading the way towards the waiters who, probably on instruction from the head waiter, have started to bypass their little spot
Roland is tempted to shout after Sylvester that he should be bloody grateful that he, Professor Roland Quartey, has even bothered to offer up his insights free of charge because guess what? who’s the one being paid $10,000 to deliver an hour-long lecture in American universities, which is probably more than you earn in two years with your outdated 97% tin-pot theatre company that 1% of the general public has heard of
so you can keep your social conscience, Comrade, because he, Roland, has something far more powerful up his sleeve and it’s called
CULTURAL CAPITAL!!!!
Roland is, however, far too sophisticated to cause such a scene, he looks around, the volume and vivacity in the room is increasing as the prosecco loosens up everyone’s inner theatricals
stage right from the kitchen, the canapés make their entrance, held aloft on gilded trays by tasty young men who enter like a buff chorus line
he spots Shirley across the room, still attired à la Women’s Institute circa 1984 (dear heart)
Dominique is here too, he hasn’t seen her in ages, still divinely sexy in a dykey-bikey way, even in her fifties, also being swamped by a group of drooling fangirls (plus ça change)
Kenny is prowling around the impossibly handsome and probably Nigerian beefsteak security man at the door who seems to be lapping up the attention
Roland prefers white flesh, Kenny likes black flesh, it’s as simple as that
they’re quite independent during the week, weekends they visit farmers’ markets, catch up with friends, sometimes in the countryside
a few times a year they take long weekend breaks to their favourite cities: Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Vilnius, Budapest, Ljubljana
summers are spent in the Gambia or Florida
‘discretion not deception’ is the motto of their twenty-four-year-old union, otherwise they’re both free to do their own thing
which they both take advantage of when the urge moves them, so long as they don’t bring anyone back to their sanctuary
home
Roland wanders out on to the promenade overlooking the Thames
the night sky is spangled with as many stars as pollution makes visible in this city
the river looks like a pulsating oil slick of viscosity at this late hour
the typical medley of buildings opposite are in silhouette
he simply adores London and for a long time now, in the increasingly rarefied circles of his existence, the city loves him back
as for the scorn currently poured on the so-called ‘metropolitan elite’, he’s worked bloody hard to reach the pinnacle of his profession, and it’s infuriating that the term is now bandied around by a proliferation of politicians and right-wing demagogues as one of society’s evils, who ridiculously accuse 48% of British voters who voted to stay in the EU of being just that