Musically, ‘You Have Loved Enough’ Soars

A story of love and loss is at the heart of the operatic and ambitious ‘You Have Loved Enough’. The jukebox opera premiered at Windhoek High School’s auditorium last week, directed by Sandy Rudd, starring Galilei Njembo and Othello Joseph and featuring the harmonic talents of Let’s Sing Ensemble.

Written by Njembo and Rudd, ‘You Have Loved Enough’ employs a minimalist stage with pools of light illuminating the leads, two lovers from different worlds, played by Njembo and Joseph, who speak to their respective experiences of love, ambition, abuse, mental health, loss and grief.

To this end, Njembo in writing collaboration with Rudd, pays homage to genre greats across music, opera and folk music, weaving musical works from the French and Italian opera canon, ‘Parade’, ‘Les Miserables’, ‘West Side Story’ and even Bon Iver into a narrative that tells a tragic love story. Poetry and music by Leonard Cohen provide much of Joseph’s script ,which also expands on the leads meeting at a jazz bar.

The beginning of their story, the first half of the production, is told in retrospect.

Underscoring the ultimate distance between the leads by positioning them on either side of the stage and drawing focus to their experience with a lamp and a spotlight, Rudd alternately illuminates perspective or plunges the characters into the darkness of silence, depression, isolation, mental health challenges and past and current trauma.

The couple’s long walks and talks are memories told in poetry and prose, while many of the feelings of hope, love and grief are made vivid through song.

For his part, Njembo is outstanding. The singer’s voice – beautiful, clear and true – is presented in contrast to Joseph, whose recitations are sometimes a little muffled, generally articulate, but are in want of a certain élan.

While Joseph’s material is mostly melancholic, an opportunity was largely missed to deeply embody the words, feel them in one’s gut and speak them in a way that coherently and intentionally plays with volume, tone and facial expression in a manner that feels fresh, painful but alive, and all Joseph’s own.

So starkly juxtaposed with Njembo’s dynamic, energetic and poignant performance of sagely selected art song, opera and contemporary music, Joseph’s performance, as a dramatic reading, plays as underwritten and somewhat lacking in animating direction.

Far more fascinating, convincing, embodied and perhaps more deeply felt were Joseph’s moments of movement and dance, during which the performer seemed to sink into the music, visceral, trance-like and shining, even on a stage so dimly lit.

Though more could be made of the fact that the central relationship was a queer one, presumably plagued by all the challenges LGBTQIA+ people experience all over the world, the work doesn’t dwell on this and the actors don’t actually interact.

This seems a pity.

When the entire production is about a great love, telling rather than showing seems a miscalculation.

There is no close moment which builds chemistry between the leads, illustrates how they interacted, tenderly or otherwise, and there is no experience of the thrill of their first meeting.

For me, this omission dilutes audience investment and doesn’t allow us to truly connect with the leads as a couple or mutually miss the moments these characters yearn for once lost.

Musically, ‘You Have Loved Enough’, soars.

Let’s Sing Ensemble hits all the right notes, adding mood and texture to the mourning pieces and in an affecting arrangement of Bon Iver’s ‘715 – CREEKS’. The choir’s performance of ‘Otjihambarere’ by Namibian composer Klevido Tjimune is sublime, as are Njembo’s contrasting renditions of the bright and nostalgic ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915’ and the searing ‘S.O.S. D’un Terrien en Détresse’, which leads to the production’s desperate denouement.

Understatedly directed by Rudd, who is fresh from the spectacle of ‘Forty Years of Fabulous’, ‘You Have Loved Enough’ needs some work on its narrative ambitions, character development and spoken word to better stitch these aspects to the music, but makes a compelling case for more experimental musical theatre, opera and choral performances in our local theatres – a case that was loudly applauded and no doubt relished by local enthusiasts.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.

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