Ibuka!: A Musical in Three Acts Based on the Book Erasmus Is Late

As the opening song reaches its climax, you see the dinner guests arriving at the house one by one. Each of them uses a different mode of transport. Some arrive in horse-drawn taxis, some in cars, others on foot. Harriet Martineau is the first to arrive. Tall, slow, but powerful and dignified. The lights go off for an instant. When they come on again, there she is, standing on the front steps of the house. Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense and World Bank representative, arrives in a large black car. Masaru Ibuka follows close behind, the cofounder of Sony approaches on foot. Elsie McLuhan, mother of Marshall McLuhan comes next, arriving in a horse-drawn taxi. Murry Wilson is probably the last to appear on stage, he comes on running from the right-hand side. Briefly he appears lost, heads in the wrong direction, and then finally makes it up the stone steps and through the front door of the house. Murry is the father of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. In ways that are hard to define, he seems to be responsible for most of the songs and music in this show. At certain points instruments suddenly appear on the stage and he uses them while other people are singing. This takes place even though it is rarely possible to hear what Murry is playing. It is almost as if he symbolizes the musical element of our story. He is so plainly dominated by the other guests in intellectual terms, that it is only through music that Murry can demonstrate a certain degree of mental and physical dexterity. Occasionally, in mid-conversation, he shows off the extent of his musical versatility. Murry always plays slightly clichéd show music, but it is relatively impressive all the same. Plodding, unimaginative, but deft. A marked contrast to the strong Carl Stalling influence that otherwise dominates the score. You can never hear an entire song or complete passage when Murry plays, but the snatches of music that are audible leave a strong impression on the rest of the dinner guests. Their positive reactions, toe-tapping, smiling, and nodding, seem to make him idiotically happy and depressed all at the same time.

Of course the key character in this musical is Erasmus Darwin even though the title is a nod to Masaru. Erasmus is always on the move, but he remains outside the house. He never makes it inside and spends the entire musical wandering around the stage. It is important that this stage area can accommodate the illusion of many different places and moods, all culled from the center of London and conjured up from the middle of an opium-addled brain. This means that the lighting has to be very specific, especially in the opening scene. Strong shafts of super-bright light should swing between the back and front of the set. Flashing between the people who have arrived for the dinner and the host. Erasmus may be invisible and absent to the guests, but he is ever present for the audience of this musical, lost and wandering round the city/stage. After all, tonight is the night that the mob becomes the workers, tomorrow everything will be different. It is the last chance for a complex group of people to come together across time and produce the potential for revolution. From tomorrow, Marxism is an inevitability and the power will move away from free-thinking diners and into the rightful hands of working people. That’s what it says in the book anyway. Remember we are stuck in a time slip between Georgian London and a near future.

Erasmus is late and one hundred flowers are laid out on the stage. Erasmus, in his central role, sings a little song about the time of the Hundred Flowers. A moment of destructive and devastating reassessment in China during the 1950s under Mao Tse-tung. As Erasmus sings his informative song he considers each bloom. After only a few lines of the song he begins to move around the set. Erasmus considers each flower with the eyes of a curious, detached, opiated Georgian. After quite some time he takes each bloom and moves it carefully to another place on the stage. Sometimes this activity is carried out carefully, at other times he is quite rough and handles great bundles, moving them from place to place with little care and in some distress.

One of the key issues that is explored in the book Erasmus Is Late is the idea of a time slip. And the key reflection taking place refers to the way in which this concept is so prevalent in certain forms of entertainment media. Due to the fact that this musical is based on the book, it also deals with time slips. This causes problems, but also allows certain games to be played, so throughout the destabilization at the heart of this work, we must be able to see the house that forms the base for tonight’s meal, even when action is centered elsewhere. The building is rather specific in the sense that it fits with architectural traits familiar from the Georgian period in Britain. As such, the time slip is not overstated. The center of London is still full of such buildings. And apparently they were sometimes painted bright colors. So the lighting must always be considered carefully in order to make sure that the exterior of the house changes appearance throughout this musical experience. It is not necessary to describe the look of the place too carefully. It’s the kind of house that has a basement that can be reached from the street. Iron railings surround the periphery of the site but because this may be impractical when staging an exhibition/musical, railings can also be used as a recurring decorative motif. There are some steps at the front of the house that lead up to a black door. Somehow all these things must be visible at all times, even when we are only considering the interior of the place. The windows are rather mean-looking. You cannot see the frames too easily, but the back and side walls of the set are punctuated by rows of these windows, visible at certain points and invisible at other times. It should be possible to see both the interior and the exterior of this place. Therefore maybe it is necessary to construct the façade of this house from some kind of transparent material that may occasionally appear opaque and at other times transparent, depending on how the lighting is arranged and manipulated.

After the flower interlude we are left with Erasmus standing near the front of the stage locked in one position, telling his story and introducing all the people who have arrived at his house. Acting like a narrator. Clearly he is not going to arrive at the same time as the guests but it is not certain at this point that he will never make it to this important dinner date. Only people who have read the book Erasmus Is Late will truly understand the circumstances that surround the absence of the central character. It is sufficient to say that at this moment in the musical we cannot be sure whether he will join his guests or not. This is the key element of dramatic irony that sustains the traditional element of this narrative construction. The guests are arriving and you see them go into the house and take their places around a large table. Everyone introduces themselves to each other. We cannot hear exactly what they are saying but each dinner guest appears to behave in a specific accepted and familiar way. They are all polite to each other and seem reasonably happy to meet. There is, however, a certain degree of visible tension. This tension is manifest in different, quite subtle forms. For example, through the way in which people nervously wipe their hands before meeting or look each other up and down (when they have the opportunity to do this without appearing to be rude). It is clear from this complex body language that they are all wondering where their host could have got to. And it is clear to all of us that he is lost in the middle of the set, moving flowers around and thinking about various mid-twentieth-century collapses. All linked to degraded Utopias. Erasmus moves around but cannot really make contact with any of these people. He is speaking to himself at all times, but somehow he is also communicating with the others. While he is talking, music starts to play and all the people in the dining room acknowledge each other’s presence in a resigned and relatively open way. The introductions are over. As the guests settle down to their evening of discussion and dinner, Erasmus wanders about at the front of the stage area.

This is when the second key character introduces herself. Harriet Martineau. At first it seems as if she will begin with a song, but after a couple of bars of music and a big buildup, she forces the music to stop (by waving her hands and shaking her head) and instead speaks directly and informatively, past the dinner guests and out towards an audience. Erasmus interrupts and, although Harriet continues to talk calmly and clearly, his voice drowns hers out. The reason for this is that Erasmus wants and needs to present her to everyone. Her unheard monologue and his introduction end simultaneously. As Erasmus bows away towards the back of the set, Harriet finally lets the music begin by gesturing with her hands, and she sings a little song about the fact that she’s feeling depressed and that she’s been doing too much work and that she might try a move to the countryside. Although she normally likes going to these kinds of gatherings, tonight Harriet is sure that this is not going to be an enjoyable evening. This could be a source of some tension between Erasmus and her, but he is too out of it to notice or really respond effectively to her potential dissatisfaction. For Harriet, salmon suppers and debate with Erasmus have been central to the development of her essays, pamphlets, complex rhetoric, and paradoxically hardline Libertarianism. She is reaching the point where there is a recognition of a set of contradictions that she can no longer tolerate or juggle. The main visible result of this unease is that Harriet tends to speak as if she is the only person in the room. She does not engage in real dialogue. She is rather upset that Erasmus is not at home, but the source of her real fury is the fact that she senses that tomorrow the mob will become the workers and this is something that fills her with fear. For while she believes people tend towards upward mobility, it is nonhierarchical organization that she rejects most firmly.

The reactions of the other guests at this point are rather weak. They don’t immediately warm to Harriet due to her “special relationship” with Erasmus and the rather cavalier way in which she is ignoring them in favor of the attempt to make direct contact with the absent opium-addled host. This set of problems is compounded when Harriet starts to talk about her Libertarian beliefs, her complete lack of faith in state control, and her fear of the rise of the workers—which she cannot truly understand because it is yet to take place, but she senses it will undermine her position. Harriet talks about multiple positions as a way of combating this effect. In addition, she desperately tries to address the idea that nothing is certain or fixed, but from her Georgian, early nineteenth-century position it is hard for her to use such flexibility. The other guests smile politely and some even begin to acknowledge the sad complexity that lies at the root of what she is saying. 

Erasmus is starting to move around the stage. A shop front is suddenly illuminated and the rest of the lights fade down a little. We realize that Erasmus is considering a particular shop from the late twentieth century. An electronics shop. The kind of place that stocks every type of computer, camera, and brand of discounted hi-fi equipment. And for the first time he begins to sing. His voice is a bit of a shock. A high-pitched falsetto. He rapidly outlines a story of overlapping ideas and communication while he sings about the future. At certain points he takes an opium pastille. This slows him down a little, and lowers the pitch of his voice, but within a couple of lines he is soaring once again. When singing he lacks any obvious signs of emotion, his voice belies his rather wrecked exterior. Erasmus sings about moving around through time and the fact that he can’t deal with relative positions. He cannot cope with modern ideas about having multiple positions and a rather complicated, layered view of things. Yet he can understand why these multiple positions might develop, in fact he is the conduit between the two eras under consideration in this musical. It is Erasmus who stands at the center. He is symbolic of a period that created the conditions that allowed for both Marxism and free-market positions. Standing caught between these two areas pleases him greatly. As his song ends, the first act of our musical draws to a close with a monologue from Erasmus directed at the audience. 

The lights start to come up in the dining room of the house. And everyone is having an animated conversation. They remain oblivious to the presence of their high-pitched host.

Erasmus addresses everyone:

But as we have discovered, days are not the same and if they are not even tied together by some thread of continuity, is nothing located? At least general trends might be predictable. That’s the way it has been until now. Yet I fear that these undercurrents that permit a degree of rationalization are merely coincidence. And on the trail of some opium I think even less in those fixed slightly progressive terms. I am permitted to time-slip into your mode of multiple referencing. But it is not your theoretical freewheeling, my version of multi-vision merely apes ahistoricism. No cultural kleptomania. My time slip is based on what could be and not on some existential set of total referencing that may lead to inactivity.3

And as he finishes this speech the lights come up really brightly, and you see all the people, including Erasmus, locked on stage. They are no longer moving but fixed in anticipation of what will take place. A loud crescendo of music indicates the end. Fade the lights to black.

Act 2

The second act opens with deafening traffic noise which gradually starts to calm down. Specific lighting effects allow for silhouettes of cars and trucks to be projected across the set. The glow of a shop window is quite a clear focus point. You can also see the dinner guests, whose set has now been dragged towards the back of the performance area. They are only lightly illuminated, as if by candlelight. The façades of four more shops, all slightly similar to the first, gradually fade up from the darkness of the set. It soon becomes apparent that Erasmus is with us again, lurking around the shop windows. He is obviously in no hurry and takes his time as he studies the different signs that decorate the shop fronts. These logos in the form of names are also projected around the set. Each one alludes to a specific electronics company. Erasmus seems fascinated by all these clear and powerful signs. As he walks around he begins to hear music. A chorus of people, none of whom are visible on the stage, hum a song that involves the names and objects that he can see in the five sites for developments in electronic communication that are now available to him.

Ibuka!, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 1995. Photograph: Di Gorni.

The lights fade down and attention turns back to the guests. Murry leaves the table and takes us on a walk down a narrow passageway. A staircase is visible on one side. He looks around as he walks, and checks the varied architectural features of the house. It is not a type of building that he is familiar with, he seems a little confused, while also appreciating the place. All this time we can hear loud sounds of conversation coming from the dining room. Murry’s exploratory interlude is accompanied by music. 

As Murry walks, the dining room element of the set moves towards the front of the set. The table is now clearly visible. It is heavy and made of wood, covered with a clean white cloth and fairly empty considering the importance of tonight’s dinner. There is a mantelpiece with photographs, drawings, and some pottery. Murry is still temporarily distracted by his exploratory mood. He is somehow guiding us through the house, while Erasmus starts to sing a song, also guiding in his own opium-addled way. The words are a reminder that it is important to think about the way in which society is constructed. And that he will try and lead us into territories that are very vivid. Too difficult to deal with. All this will happen without straying too far from his home. So it becomes clear from this song why everything must remain visible simultaneously within this set. Erasmus sings about how he is not interested in Man developing fitness for anything. So he is not concerned with the classic interpretation of evolution because he believes that Man has already transcended such a state and entered a period where there is a degree of free will involved in decision-making that ensures a particular unevenness. Also Erasmus has a major problem dealing with any of these things, because the theory of evolution has not yet been developed. So (by default) he is more interested in unfitness and underachievement. He is singing about how exciting it would be if you could enter a state of continual reconsideration rather than a simple, straightforward way of looking at the world. He cannot think in relativistic terms or flash around through time as well as others but he will be able to later. Erasmus admits that in order to do this he will need some new starting points. And maybe it is becoming clear that this guide, walking around shops and other places, also this nonappearance at the dinner, have got something to do with creating a new way of looking at the world. Or at the very least a new way of creating some starting points in order to help us devise a way to live, an alternative to the rise of free-market thinking. It’s the last chance for a revolution. Erasmus admits that he is engaged in a faded analysis, or rather a blurry analysis. He is standing caught between shop fronts, moving this way and that. He can’t decide which way to go.

Without warning Erasmus turns towards the dinner guests, the lights come on in the dining room, and all the guests turn towards him. It is clear from the way they move their heads and scan the set that they cannot actually see him. But somehow they can hear him. The music drops to a very sinister and low tempo. Erasmus begins to sing. The words to the song are complicated. And there is no mistaking the seriousness of his message: 

One option here
is for us to chase
a consistent level of ongoing invention.
This is supposed to occur
and, while change has been slow,
it has not been imperceptible. 

Certainly when keeping in mind
what goes on beyond the kind of discussion
that tends to take place at a dinner like this.
Maybe, concerning what was said earlier,
we are in fact taking part in the construction
of a whole new series of tiny moral frameworks
that guide our actions
instead of some grand, overwhelming, and therefore
rather clumsy idea.

This proposal would seem reasonable,
seeing as it is always being adapted
by the most dynamic people,
although to link ourselves
with such groups
may be dangerous at this stage.

Erasmus repeats the last lines a couple of times. There is a sense in which the conclusion of Act Two is rather different to the first. There is no clear climax or musical crescendo. The secondary lights and the plaintive singing just fade away. We are left with Erasmus standing in the middle of the road. The final spots fade down. And you can see that all the guests are rather concerned as the dining room is swallowed up by the encroaching darkness. They know something has been said but they are not exactly clear who said it. The “unheard” song had a profound effect, but it was communicated without clarity, direction, or true comprehension. Murry, Masaru, Robert, Elsie, and Harriet are disturbed and unsettled by the developments tonight.

Act 3 

This time only one of the shop fronts is visible and we are also confronted by a big traffic island in the middle of the set, positioned right at the very front. And Erasmus is standing there on the traffic island, clearly visible to any kind of audience. You cannot see the dinner guests anymore. Due to lighting and the use of some screens which have been pulled in front of the dining room area. Some kind of projection has been made onto the back wall. This gives us a detailed view of Erasmus. His hair is long and grey, combed back off his forehead, and it seems to extend seamlessly into bushy grey sideburns. He has taken off his top hat and holds it in his hands. The music at this stage has become really quite loud. There is no singing, just Erasmus, stuck, locked onto this traffic island. All the focus should really be on him at this point. We are entering a period of reminiscence. He starts to recall his background and especially his childhood. The large projection on the back wall starts to shift and we are allowed to see what he is thinking. This process is quite straightforward. When he thinks about his brother you see an image of his brother. A transparently dumb way of presenting a set of memories but quite in keeping with the opium-laced absent central character. Many other images are projected. A house in the country and a house in the city are obviously important for him. A university in Edinburgh and a college in the center of London. A house, a tunnel system. The Poster Studio and Richard Wolff’s film studio. All these images indicate a past in a rather hollow, sloppy way. During this period, Erasmus does not talk and he does not sing. But you can see varied images and hear loud music. The sounds are extremely variable, including a soundtrack for the “Snow Dancing” party. 

Towards the end of this sequence, you realize that some people are moving around behind him. They are wearing “snaking suits,” a bit like wetsuits that have been altered. Long tails have been added to these outfits. The people who are wearing them crawl along the floor, using their arms in order to move, swinging their tails from side to side. This is the best way for them to travel across the set. They are never clearly visible, but remain in the middle distance. Erasmus is blind to this activity but it does seem to make him a little more agitated. It is as if they were a rather clumsy illustration of an Erasmus idea. It is about time that he snapped out of his reverie, and thankfully he begins to talk about the shop windows. This is clearly one of the key elements of his absence that really interests him. He describes the displays and tries to explain the fact that he doesn’t completely understand what they are and what they are for. He talks about the idea of debate. And reveals that he is not so sure what is going to happen tonight in the house or on his tour. He is particularly drawn to the shop front that carries the sign “Microworld,” Erasmus finds the name funny. After enough opium, anyone could get sucked into this discussion of shops and electronic communication.

Very slowly the screens hiding the diners have been pulled back and the lights are fading up. You can now see all the dinner guests once more. The traffic island starts to slide towards the back of the stage area and while this is happening the house stays where it is, but the dining room area separates away and slides towards the front of the set. This allows us to study all of the parallel people. The others. As the dining room locks to the front of the stage, the table starts to rotate and each person gets up in turn and comes to stand where Erasmus had been on the traffic island. With a full spotlight you have a chance to study each of them. The American man with the glasses and the bald head. The Japanese technologist and prototype fetishist. The American musician and frustrated songwriter. “Two Step Side Step.” The Canadian public speaker and finally Harriet, with her stiff, English attitude that fits so well with a desire for radical Libertarian development. A development that none of them truly wants. If they did, they would do something tonight. But they fear the worst. Not the people who will come later, but the true Georgians. For Erasmus and Harriet will leave the right conditions for the development of contradictory sociopolitical impulses.

After the inspection process, the guests return to their places at the dinner table. Murry comes forward and explains that he is really happy to be at the dinner, after a short time he begins to hum a stupid, happy, but not unpleasant tune. Then he begins to sing about how pleased he is with the way in which the evening is going and what a privilege it is for him to be included at a salmon supper like this. Fortunately the focus begins to shift once more to Erasmus who throughout this time has been wandering around in a rather nervous and increasingly clumsy way. He is heading for a collapse. Full of opium and frightened to face up to what is going to take place. Erasmus can remember the future. Always moving towards the back of the stage. A spotlight follows him as he wanders around and Murry continues to hum his stupid song. Erasmus is moving and Murry turns his attention to the mantelpiece. Inspecting each item in turn. The other guests are smiling at him, they find his actions amusing. So will the father of Brian Wilson really inherit all this potential and pass it on to his son? “I get around” is, after all, Erasmus’s current motto. 

Erasmus is agitated, staggering around in near darkness. Still moving between one shop and another towards the back of the stage. He flickers between exhaustion and elation. The lighting at this point is completely out of control. Suddenly, without warning, McNamara stands up and everyone stops what they were doing. McNamara makes a very powerful speech, powerful because it sounds so reasonable. He talks about the idea of the individual. And the way the individual has been rationalized in Western cultures. He also talks about the fact that whenever you try and analyze something in a new way you tend to lay down certain fixed points because there is no other way you can proceed. And although the specific things you talk about in your analysis may not be so interesting for people, those little markers and spots that you leave behind, those moments of minor conclusion, are really useful for the development of further debate. These micro-conclusions are the powerful elements of analysis and they can really alter the way in which people consider society. It is possible that he is claiming to be more interested in structure than content. This is because he is rather worried about using metaphors and cannot cope with symbolic rationalizations. This is clearly not such a problem for the other people, but it really worries McNamara. He starts reflecting upon Erasmus’s actions tonight. Somehow he is now functioning as a commentator. Taking stock of the whole situation. Talking the ideas of a parallel historian. Someone from the past who operates as “The Other Man,” someone who works alongside other people but is not quite at the center of things. With certain situations, people can get stuck, feeling that things happen to them and not the other way round. McNamara explains how he feels very close to this mode of behavior. He can really appreciate what Erasmus is doing. But the more he tries to plead sympathy with Erasmus, talking about Malthus and other Georgian thinkers, the more animated and agitated Erasmus becomes. As things really get going, he starts marching around towards the back of the stage and just occasionally comes forwards. When Erasmus moves to the front he stares hard at McNamara before going back and resuming his avoidance. 

Ibuka!, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 1995. Photograph: Di Gorni.

The others take their turns on the traffic island. Every time someone comes forward to speak about their ideas, as McNamara is doing at the moment, Erasmus comes up really close to them and checks them out extremely carefully. This activity seems to give him pleasure. It is as if they were all trying to work something out, to understand, but they cannot see their host. Maybe he holds the key to future events. There will be no revolution. Erasmus is happy just to look at the people he brought together for this one night. At this point, for example, he is going through McNamara’s pockets. While unable to completely control his guests, he can at least examine and absorb them. This process begins to overwhelm him. He starts to try and interrupt and he wins the “talk the loudest competition” for volume with his piercing falsetto. This is inevitable even though the others cannot hear him. Erasmus, as always, drowning everyone out with talk of opium and free thinking. 

Part 5: Conclusion, “Go Home”

Dumping goods on other markets. A technique employed to ensure the corruption of that longed-for fantasy of free trade and exchange. It has been a recurring subtext. A matter of great concern to all the people here. Well, maybe not to Murry, but even he is starting to believe that he is part of this free-market dynamic. After all, it is people like him who will defend it most rigorously, even while hiding behind a protectionist position that would stun Erasmus, if he were to truly understand it.

The white tablecloth is stained. Some of the guests have even made notes directly onto its surface. It seems as if this house has no note paper. There is a rumor that later in life, or was it earlier, Erasmus wrote some poetry. This may be true, but he certainly wasn’t writing much at the time of this meal. Near the beginning of the supper there had been a search for paper and pens at a point when Masaru felt it necessary to explain the U-shaped pricing curve. Despite Elsie’s thorough search through the house, not a single scrap of paper or any writing implements could be found. Fortunately Bob had a pen, so they began to work straight onto the tablecloth. Elsie didn’t approve, Harriet loved the idea, McNamara thought it a practical solution, Masaru was no longer paying attention, and Murry didn’t care either way.

And we can see them all sitting there. The question of whether or not they have eaten anything is irrelevant to the narrative. Erasmus is still trying to communicate.

“Yes, yes.” Erasmus is warming up, and so late in the day. “Guilds, apprentices, and societies. But not the workers. An optimism prevailed and it is one that still exists for me. A belief in the inexorable rise of the human—that people stuck in a specific social crisis will rise out of it. A relative growth based on free thinking and lack of overwhelming control. I enjoy hearing your people harking back to a time before their confused attempts at social responsibility. We believed that people would help themselves but we could not imagine how they would do it. The ideas shifted across the Atlantic and the channel. We could not imagine them using our terminology. What a rise. The development of a language that can deal with the whole idea of communication. Something to be subjected to and something to involve yourself in. The adjustment of Elysian Utopias into materialist Utopias. The variability and mutability of nonconformist theory. A degree of pragmatism. And we had it all. Ecology. Biology. Technology and a lump of opium dissolved. Toying with another salmon supper.”

So there was a book concerning a dinner and now there could be a musical too. Part of a structure that has been rearranged and is now open to further adaptation using this new book as a guide. Looking for parallel positions and playing within the spaces that are opened up as a result of this approach. Ibuka! is rather closely connected to an attempt to come to terms with an entertainment media that frequently focuses upon time slips as an essential part of its construction but also it is just a potential musical/exhibition. Ibuka! could be done. Yet it is not necessary to research every part. A reading of the book Erasmus Is Late could already set up a number of possibilities. Ibuka! Come into the office with a pair of headphones taped to your head and everything will become clear.