By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (12 June 2019 fir 14 June 2019)
Heartstrings’
latest production, ‘Don’t Panic’, is a stunner of a comedy. It’s a show that
deals with the usual issues of infidelity and betrayal but from an unusually
ingenious point of view.
At the
outset, you won’t imagine that Patricia (Bernice Nthenya) and Mashudi (Victor
Nyaata) are anything other than love birds thrilled to be celebrating their
third anniversary of marriage. They look like the ideal couple. Even Victor’s single
younger brother Zadock (Nick Kwach) admires them so much he’s thinking of
following their lead and getting hitched himself.
Patricia
raises one small point in passing about Mashudi’s infidelity in their first
year of wedlock which broke her heart. But the incident is skipped over lightly,
as if it’s of no consequence. But it is.
In the last
scene of the play, we learn Mashudi’s infidelity hit her so hard, she took
drastic action, unbeknownst to him. She even knows about his current affair with
Paravina (Mackrine Andala), who has the audacity to show up at the party. But Pat
doesn’t let on that she knows. Instead, she acts as if all is well until the
time is right.
She doesn’t
reveal her secret until after Paravina shows up, intent on exposing her lover’s
duplicity to Patricia and then making her demands. But it doesn’t work that
way. Once Zadock figures out who this woman is, he tries to rescue the
situation by claiming she’s his new sweetheart and wife-to-be.
That ruse
also gets crushed once Zadock’s real sweetie, Ruena (Cindy Kahuha) shows up and
hears the group talking about Nick’s new ‘bride to be’. She’s furious, so the
truth has to be told.
But before Zadock
gets a chance to explain, Patricia spills the beans to say she’s known about Mashudi’s
infidelity from the beginning. She even knows that Paravina is three months
pregnant with Mash’s seed.
But the real
shocker comes as she explains why she kept quiet and what she did in the meantime.
She had drawn up divorce papers after Mashudi’s initial infidelity which he’d apparently
signed. After that, she said no more about it even though she quietly followed
through on her threat and legally divorced the guy. Staying on after the
divorce was her way of “resisting being made a victim”.
She admits
she could have left, but then she would have been just another impoverished
woman with no home of her own. So instead, she played the same game as Mashudi
who lied about his devotion to their marriage, and so did she. It’s her way of keeping
her head up high while devising the best strategy of escape.
In the end,
right after she spills the beans and before she walks out the door, Patricia
confesses that Amos, the grounds-keeper, is none other than her new boyfriend.
‘Don’t Panic’
may sound like serious stuff, but in keeping with Heartstrings’ style of
hilarity, there is plenty of humor in the show, especially after the Pastor (Cyprian
Osoro) shows up to celebrate the couple he’d officially wedded three years
before. Making a flamboyant entrance, the Pastor can’t help preaching,
enlisting Zadock in Bible readings as he repeats the righteous verses with
theatrical flare, particularly those ironically related to the recklessness of the
man who indulges his lusts with women.
What is
slightly inconceivable is the way Patricia pretends that all is well when it was
not.She even welcomes Paravina into her home and practically treats her like a
co-wife without revealing what she knows. Assumedly, she’d given lots of
thought to what to do since she was faced with the same dilemma that many
Kenyan married women have, namely how to save face and not reveal the humiliation
of your spouse’s infidelity and betrayal. Patricia’s strategy was possibly the
only path she could have pursued—namely, staying patient, bidding her time
until the moment was right for her to get out and start again.
There’s a
message for married women in ‘Don’t Panic’. Maybe not to do exactly as Patricia
did, but by refusing to be trapped, she resisted being tricked and victimized. She
plotted and planned how to take her life into her own hands and not depend on or
wait for her man to change. By choosing to chart her own course, she might get
more married women thinking—how best to do the same.
In ‘Don’t Panic’,
it is the woman who has the last word!
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