The Brooklyn Rail

We live in an age of revisionist history. Narratives are up for grabs. Identities are transpositionally fluid. Interpolation can lead to the revelation or suppression of deeper truths. Some artistic efforts along these lines curry attention without leading to enlightenment, such as the grating TV series Bridgerton and The Buccaneers. Some examples, like Peter Milligan and Adam Pollina’s comic book Pyrate Queen (2021), flip the gender switch and enthrall through situational novelty and striking visuals. But leave it to fine artists to plumb historical depths to find charged readings. Hilary Harkness showed us that with her engaging and deliciously deceptive reworking of Winslow Homer and the Civil War in her “Prisoners from the Front” series of paintings at P·P·O·W last fall. And now we have Stan Douglas’s sharp and controlled take on the early-eighteenth century British writer John Gay’s little-known sequel to his Beggar’s Opera (1728): a ballad opera titled Polly published in 1729 and never produced in his lifetime. The crown banned it due to lingering resentment over the satirical take on the government in The Beggar’s Opera and Polly’s exposure of crises in colonialism. The show’s title, The Enemy of All Mankind, refers to maritime law of the period that encouraged attacks on pirates—reflecting colonial nations threatened by the outlaws’ freedom and democratic codes.

Douglas relates Gay’s story with a few twists in three rooms via nine large inkjet prints mounted on Dibond aluminum, along with two other ancillary works (all 2024). Each Polly image bears a long, explanatory title, and all were shot in Jamaica, taking advantage of its historical houses and tropical verdure. It is the tale of Polly Peachum, the white estranged wife of The Beggar’s Opera’s profligate protagonist, Captain Macheath, head of a gang of robbers, who escapes a hanging and marries this daughter of his chief criminal rival. Subsequently, in Polly, Macheath, punished with transportation to the West Indies, avoids his sentence of indentured labor, assumes a Black identity, and establishes himself as a free pirate named Morano. Polly crosses the Atlantic to find him. Polly has been little produced since 1922 because Macheath must be played in blackface, but Douglas flips the script by making him light-skinned and able to pass as white in England, and then having him assume his true Black ethnicity in the West Indies. The photographs, hung out of sequence for visual impact, convey the story in rich form. They are the product of Douglas’s characteristically meticulous method of setting up scenes, employing multiple shots, and then digitally collaging the images—he has been working exclusively in digital since 2008. The anonymous actors played out the scenes while Douglas took pictures and then selected the best takes and interwove them with the equally sharp focused and brilliantly colored shots of settings.

In the rear room, Overture, the first in the series, shows Macheath shackled and led in a queue into the hold of a ship for transportation to the Caribbean (Overture [1986], an early, unrelated film, is installed in a gallery nearby). It is a cinematically panoramic shot staged against a blindingly yellow, brick-wharfside building angled back to the right. The image recalls Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary long take in Gangs of New York (2002) of penniless Irish immigrants disembarking in New York harbor in 1863, immediately being conscripted at a Union Army recruiter’s table and given fresh new blue uniforms and rifles, and then embarking onto another boat to be sent straight down the Atlantic coast to the Civil War. In Douglas’s image, the format channels the stately grandeur of figures in the Ionic frieze of the Panathenaic procession on the Parthenon, reflected in Macheath’s dispassionate expression. In the 59 1/4-inch square Act I, Scene V, Polly has arrived on the island scene and meets a female family friend at an estate who will turn on her and sell her into sexual slavery to the landowner as a courtesan. Here, Douglas introduces perspective as a player in the series, with a vanishing point at the right that corresponds with the scheming woman, an orthogonally rich checkerboard floor, and equally focused view into the landscape through the plantation house’s front door at the left behind Polly. In the front gallery is the ensuing Act I, Scene VIII, another panoramic image, but here limited to two figures: Mr. Ducat, at left, and Mrs. Ducat, at right, who correctly accuses her protesting spouse of bringing Polly into the household as his mistress. The perfectly centered one-point perspective, in an interior replete with the trappings of white colonialism in the form of family portraits, Eastern carpets, and imported vessels and wall hangings, exacerbates the sense of the chaos that will ensue. Two subsequent decentered interior scenes cleverly introduce mirrors that expand the rooms, afford varied views of people’s faces, and complicate the interior perspectives. Gay’s take on Shakespearean crossdressing enters the plot when Mrs. Ducat helps Polly to escape and assume a male identity for ease of movement, bringing her into contact with the pirates, Macheath/Morano’s new wife who is attracted to her, and the Maroons, Indigenous free Black people (pre-emancipation in the 1830s), and their queen. These are set in emerald hued and sharply detailed tropical forest locales. The most spectacular is a stylistically non–eighteenth-century immersive forest confrontation: Act III, Scene VII, the final battle between Morano/Macheath and the Maroon Queen. The Maroons execute the defeated Macheath, Polly marries their prince, and the imagined revised history heads towards a bright, if uncommon, future.

In the middle room, two ancillary photos break the spell and surprisingly thrust the narrative into the present and Douglas’s own experience. Africa Rock is a portrait format image of a boulder he encountered during the shoot in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where the Maroons still reside. It bears a carved outline of the African continent, painted in faded hues—a marker of the between 9.6 and 15.4 million Africans taken to the Americas. And finally, Ghostlight, at 120 inches wide the largest work in the show, shows the interior of the darkened and vacant Los Angeles Theatre from the central orchestra, with a single incandescent bulb glowing onstage in a floor lamp—a superstitious acknowledgement of the specters that haunt our stories (disused or repurposed theaters, from Detroit to Havana, frequently appear in Douglas’s works).

In adapting Gay’s opera, Douglas has not belabored it with a modern sensibility, with popular treatment and arch aspects, in the way that Bridgerton plays fast with history, speech, and pop music, but has respected its period nature in the vein of films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), Éric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001), and Mike Leigh’s Peterloo (2018). Douglas has also channeled the late British Augustan period and its restrained pictorial traditions as seen in paintings and prints such as Joseph Highmore’s series from the 1740s illustrating Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), William Hogarth’s popular images of the manners and morals of Georgian London society, and British conversation piece portraiture (often leavened by narrative) by artists such as Thomas Hudson, Arthur Devis, and Johan Zoffany. Added to the mix is the work by artists in the West Indies representing Black culture, character, and costume such as by Agostino Brunias (ca. 1730–96) or, in Jamaica, the Indigenous Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849), or imagery of the eighteenth-century Maroon wars by François Jules Bourgoin. The refinement in Douglas’s increasingly complex perspectives and fragmentation via mirrors, and then the expansion of the story into somewhat claustrophobic landscape settings, reflects the dislocations of the narrative and its complications of class, race, and gender. And Africa Rock and Ghostlight bring this obscure story thrillingly into the present, into the contested origins and powerful possibilities of the grimmest history, fiction, and performance.