FRESH ENERGIES AT WORK IN PERFORMING ARTS SCENE
By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 18 April 2018)
It’s finally happening! Kenyan thespians, script- and
screen-writers are at last taking seriously the need to create their own
scripts and tell their own stories. They’re doing it for stage as well as for
film and TV.
Film seems to be where the most robust forces are at work.
We’ve not only seen this with the Academy award nominee film ‘Watu Wote’ and the
Berlinale award winner, ‘Supa Modo’ but also with Tosh Gitonga’s ‘Disconnect’,
Philippa Ndisi-Hermann’s ‘New Moon’ and Hawa Esseun’s ‘Silas’.
Most recently, Wanuri Kahiu’s newest film, ‘Rafiki’ has just
been invited to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France! This will be
the first feature film to premiere at Cannes which has been shot, scripted and
stars all Kenyans.
Nonetheless, original scripts are also being born more
rapidly than ever in Nairobi’s theatre world. No longer are we only counting on
Heartstrings to come up with newly-devised scripts every month. They just
recently staged ‘Hit and Run’ and will soon be opening in another freshly
devised show, ‘Milk and Honey’.
Tonight (and tomorrow) we’ll be watching Zippy Okoth’s
original one-woman show, ‘Stranger in my Bed’ at PAWA254. Zippy’s
autobiographical script is both weep-able and raucously funny. Either way, it
comes straight from her heart.
Then the weekend starting April 28, Mbeki Mwalimu’s Back to
Basics crew will premiere their second original script, ‘Mutual Misery’ at
Alliance Francaise. It was just a couple of weeks back that Mbeki enlisted
Justin Miriichi (who’d just scripted and staged ‘My Better Halves’) to write
‘Strangers by Blood’ which was a poignant way to launch the new troupe on our
local theatre scene.
Right after B2B takes a break, Walter Sitati’s Hearts of Art
returns on May 3rd with ‘What Cannot Kill You’, another original
work by Walter who is one of Kenya’s finest playwrights currently and one who
comes out with new works regularly. His last play, ‘Repair my Heart’ combined
romance with raw violence and politics.
The other
thespian who not only writes but produces and directs his new plays is Martin Kigondu
who, with his Prevail Arts troupe and Renegade Ventures, just re-staged his
play ‘What Happens in the Night’ at the Kenya National Theatre annex.
The compact
stage of the annex ensured this new version of Kigondu’s modern classic was
more intimate and expressive of the emotional depths that this family saga was
bound to reach but didn’t quite attain during its initial rendering on the wide
Daystar University stage several months back.
Martin also
made two major casting changes that transformed the play from being slightly
tepid to becoming a far more impassioned, even explosive production.
The main
cause of the show’s volatility was Marrianne Nungo who, together with her stage
brother Bilal Mwaura, brought a whole new approach to ‘What Happens in the Night’.
Both were new to the production with Marrianne (who just starred in Likarion
Wainaina’s ‘Supa Modo’) replacing ChiChi Seii and Mwaura taking on the role of
Ray, Yvonne’s brother after Mouad Sadat left to pursue his legal practice.
Both Yvonne
and Ray are children of th retired politician played by Salim Gitau. Both have
problematic relations with their dad who comes to see his kids briefly (they
live in the same house with their spouses played by Nick Ndeda and Shivishe
Shivisi) but departs the same night, never to be seen again.
But both
Yvonne and Ray have troubled marital relations as well. Unfortunately, Martin
doesn’t delve deeply into those issues despite our seeing that both couples
have deep-seated problems. They range from Ray’s wife’s drug abuse which is possibly
related to an abortion she’d had some time back to Yvonne’s jobless writer
husband’s unfulfilled ambitions which lead to his complicity in high crimes.
‘What
Happens in the Night’ is part family drama, part murder mystery and part
thriller, which is part of the problem that I had with the play.
Martin
raises tantalizing issues in both act one and act two. But unfortunately, act
one feels like the family is the central place where conflicts arise, but those
are left unresolved by act two when somebody died (actually the dad) and the play
becomes a whodunit murder mystery. But it is not quite that either since
Yvonne’s conviction that her father was murdered is one more issue left up in
the air at the play’s end. Perhaps the dad should have died sooner so we could
have explored the whodunit bit and discovered what makes the two couples tick
in the process.
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