PRESENTED BY OUR DAY AND OMNIBUS THEATRE
Thrown together by lives built far from home, two rising Ghanaian creatives grapple with success and identity.
“A civilization flourishes when men plant trees under which they themselves never sit.
What you need to understand is, Ghana is home.”
As the afternoon sun hits BBC Broadcasting House in London, photographer James Barnor meets broadcaster Mike Eghan for the very first time. Thrown together by lives built far from home, the two rising Ghanaian creatives must manoeuvre through their perception of identity, success, assimilation and home.
This joyful and poignant fiction fuses storytelling, music and dance with archival material to capture a unique snapshot of London in the swinging sixties.
DRUM is a brand-new play from award-nominated writer Jacob Roberts Mensah (DEM TIMES, Our Day) and Sarah Amankwah (recent acting credits include Lion King, West End; Black Earth Rising, Netflix; Henry V, Shakespeare’s Globe) making her directorial debut.
The Artiscape spoke to Benjamin Sarpong-Broni about his role in the play;
What attracted you to the play?
Benjamin Sarpong-Broni: Culture. It’s about two Ghanian men that were trailblazers in the 1960s. That was the first thing that drew me as a Ghanian man myself. First and foremost, I hadn’t heard of these men and it felt like a way to tap into parts of my history and culture that I had never heard of. Then seeing that the director and my castmate were also Ghanian, I thought this could be a really interesting way of delving into culture and my heritage. Those were the first two things that got me attracted to the play, and after that the subject matter, Kwame Nkrumah, and the topics that the play deals with, it got better and better from there.
How do you research your portrayal of Mike Eghan?
BSB: Well, thank God, Mike Eghan has a documentary about him and he also has a book which I have invested time into looking into and reading. These men were living in London at a time when there was a coup in Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah had just been overthrown. There was a lot of tension in Ghana. My mum and dad were both alive at this time and just understanding what their experience has been like in Ghana gave me a lens through which to recognise how powerful Mike Eghan’s work at the BBC and James Barnor being a photographer for DRUM magazine at the time was.
What are the challenges of playing a character that represents a real person?
BSB: People know and recognise this person, they have opinions on what they were like, so the stakes to portray Mike Eghan as truthfully as possible for me personally were really high. Portraying a real person was a greater challenge than anything I’ve ever faced in my craft simply because even though there is always room to be creative, there are just a lot of facts that can’t be refuted. It forces you to do the work, do the research and find out as much information as possible about where Mike Eghan grew up, what it meant to be where he was from in Ghana, what was happening at the time. The challenge is to find the information so you can portray the most truthful character.
What are you looking forward to in performing in this production?
BSB: A celebration of culture. We have put in a lot of work through rehearsals and I’m just excited to share the huge mass of information that me and Joshua as well as Jacob, the writer, have discovered about our culture and our heritage. I’m excited about sharing that with the people that come to see this play. And just having fun portraying Ghanian men that really existed in the 1960s and were just amazing.
What do you think an audience will enjoy about this play.
BSB: The dynamics that me and Joshua have. We‘re just really high-energy. We have a great rapport. I guess we just get along and we have so much fun in this play. There aren’t only powerful scenes, but there are scenes that are quite funny, there’s a dance and movement section, there’s so much in this play. I think everyone that comes to see this play will enjoy the many different ways in which myself and Joshua tell the story of these legendary Ghanian men. It’s not just two people talking to each other, it’s high-octane beautiful, cultural loveliness.
