HEARTSTRINGS BACK WITH A BANG

EARTSTRINGS COMES BACK WITH A BANG

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 9 November 2021)

Heartstrings Kenya is back at last. Their return was long-awaited as could be seen from the full-houses that showed up to see ‘Don’t Knock’, another one of the company’s crazy comedies.

As usual, Heartstrings took up current events and transformed them into juicy jokes that come straight off the ground where ordinary Kenyans have been barely surviving since the coronavirus arrived early last year.

As you’d expect, COVID-19 had to figure into the show’s script somewhere. In fact, it appears at the end of Act One when its arrival leads to the abrupt cancelation of an Events Entertainment group’s major effort to organize a Sh250 million Walk for sick kids traveling to India.

Paul Ogola as Chrispinus heads the organizing team which is already being interrupted by beautiful women. First comes the ‘professional mourner’ (Machrine Andala), then the slinky company manager Jazzy (Adelyne Nimo), and finally, Ogola’s delicious wife, Katalina (Bernice Nthenye). Ogola’s absenting himself from the office with Jazzy isn’t conspicuous. Its consequences only appear in Act 2 when you recognize her as the single mother coming to claim child support for Ogola’s son. Only now, she is no longer slinky and sexy. She’s angry and adamant that Ogola do his bit to assist in his son’s upbringing.

If the show doesn’t sound funny at this point, be assured, the cast is never short of insider jokes and sheng asides that keep the audience laughing and prepared for appreciate the lampooning of everyone from the president and MPs to gospel singers and boss Chrispinus who’s both a bully and a crook.

For instance, after Katalina has contributed sh10,000 towards one employee’s wedding plans, Ogola only hands over Sh2,000 to the man. And when he gets caught on the day Katalina shows up at work, he makes up such lame excuses you know he can even ignore the upbringing of his own child.

But Ogola gets his due in Act 2. That is when we get to the really pithy part of the play. It’s also when the troupe brings COVID and the lockdown home to their story. For now, we get an insider perspective of what has actually gone on in families who’d been stranded at home together during the pandemic.

We see that previously, Chris and Katalina hardly knew one another before lockdown. Or at least they didn’t know all the serious secrets they each had kept from the other.

As the show opens, Bernice is starting off her typical morning with yoga exercise. But in her workout clothes and without her long-haired wig and makeup, Ogola doesn’t recognize his own wife!

But that’s just the beginning. Lockdown has also led to joblessness, threats of evictions, and the basic struggle to put food on the table since cash is now in short supply. All of these issues come flooding up in Act 2 as both Chris and Katalina have lost their jobs. But as it turns out, they have lost lots more than that.

Innocent-looking Katalina had taken the family’s title deed, sold it to buy ‘better properties’ from conmen, and never told Chris until now about what she did.

But as bad as that is, when single mother Jazzy shows up to insist on child support, the fireworks start to fly. Chris is trapped like a rat. His stand against his wife’s ‘bad land’ secret seems to pale next to the arrival of ‘the other woman’ and news of his secret love child. He tries to cover up his secret by blaming Katalina, first for telling her mother about their penury and then plotting with her aunt to get a job with an MP.

But the whole situation explodes when Ogola’s mother (Machrine Andala) shows up and discovers she has a grandchild that her son has denied.

Katalina seems dumbfounded by the whole affair, especially after Jazzy discovers she had never cooked for Chris. She’s only ordered out from a pricey food delivery service.

Ultimately, it’s Chris’s mum who turns the tide around. She’s irate about the basic facts on the ground, especially that there’s a child, her grandson, who she insists will no longer be neglected. He must have a father, and Chris, Katalina, and even Jazzy must face this fact, she says.

They’ll have to work out the details, but her moralistic explosion brings resolution to a messy situation that only Heartstrings could devise, picking up pieces from people’s everyday lives.

Great show but heavy editing is required to tighten up the flow.