Alexander McCall Smith, author of the ever-popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, has taken to opera. McCall Smith wrote the libretto for the recently premiered Okavango Macbeth, which draws sensitive comparisons between human society and baboon society. Watch a video on the production below:
It is a scene worthy of the gentle surrealism of a Mma Ramotswe story. In a converted garage, surrounded by thorny bushveld, Alexander McCall Smith, one of the world’s best-read authors, sits in his safari hat watching 20 opera singers playing baboons.“The idea came to me when I was on holiday in the Okavango Delta and came across a group of American primatologists who had been studying baboon behaviour for 12 years,” he said of The Okavango Macbeth, which had its world premiere last night in front of a select audience of 56 people at the No 1 Ladies’ Opera House just outside Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. “Baboon society has some Lady Macbeth issues, in that ambitious individuals try to push others up the pecking order.”
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