‘Radicals’
is a dark but action-packed play that was workshopped into being by Nice
Githinji and her latest crop of Jinice Visafe Players. The players are young
people, being mentored by the actress turned ‘mwalimu’, who clearly have
unflattering opinions of revolutionaries bent on overturning ‘the system’ by
any means necessary.
The Golden
Boys is the gang of radicals named by Bilal Mwaura, the playwright (better
known as an edgy actor) that took the youth’s opinions and wove them into an
explosive script. He was careful not to identify them with any cult, cause or
culture apart from the kind that shoots first and doesn’t bother to ask
questions after that.
Most violent
among them is the scary sadistic woman called Zuri (Violent Bijura). She’s the
one who laughs wildly when people die and is even more gleeful when she sees
killings by one of the Boys, including the bomb-maker Seven (Tedd Murene) who
she’s taunted for being a coward for not wanting to die.
The play is
all about the disintegration of the group after they have been ambushed and
their leader seriously wounded. Many of the Boys have already died, but as they
captured one of the ‘enemy’, they hope to obtain random money to use to escape
over the border. But as this sorry lot has no unifying ideology, aspiration or radical
goal other than destruction of the status quo, nor do they have a leader to
hold them together, they only have the number two, Shadow (Francis Ouma Faiz).
But he arrives at their temporary camp after the chaos has already begun. All
he can do is bring in another ‘enemy’ and inform the Boys they have a snitch in
their midst.
Zuri has
already finished the first ‘enemy’ and clearly got a kick out of killing him. She’s
so trigger-happy that nobody among them is safe, especially the dying leader’s
wife (Lucy Waheto) who she suspects correctly is the mole.
In the end,
everybody dies (apparently) apart from Tee (Cindy Sharrifa) who’s the only one
in the group who seems to have any sense. She’s the one who finally shoots the
snitch after she’s exposed by the cop who’s arrived in time to finish off this
sorry lot of so-called radicals.
With
effective sound and lighting by Tim King’oo (who’s soon to stage Sibi Okumu’s ‘Kaggia’),
Radicals projects a clear-cut message, that radicalism doesn’t work.
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