DYSFUNCTIONALITY AS WHIMSICAL DRAMA: THE DYING NEED NO SHOES

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 27 May 2022)

‘The dying need no shoes’, which opened at Kenya National Theatre May 17^th,  is a deep, dark, delusional drama about an exceedingly dysfunctional relationship between a father (Ben Tekee) and daughter (Clare Wahome).

It’s also an intensely original play that Dr Fred Mbogo conjured up out of a mental space that serves us well during this Mental Health Awareness Month.

For both of Dr. Mbogo’s characters have been mentally disfigured, he by his past, and she by him who has had an incestuous relationship with her since she was an infant.

Now 21, she has grown up and he wants her dead. Is it because she is no longer a child, and he, a university professor, likes to mess with younger women? Also, she’s old enough now to see what he does and could be dangerous to his career. So, possibly out of self-preservation, he needs her out of the way.

Or is it merely that he’s obsessed with death, both theoretically (he writes scholarly tomes on the topic) and as a practice he wants to put to the test.

Either way, theirs is an intense and often violent relationship. On opening night, when we were invited by director Alacoque Tome to sit up on stage to watch the performance, we got a chance to get up close and personal with the stars.

Clare Wahome had already come on stage in character, behaving like a sleep-walking zombie whose condition we later learn is drug-induced. She looks lost and desperate, so much so that she nearly drowns in a bathtub, saved only when her father arrives in the nick of time.

He saves her and yet, he preaches to her about the virtues of death as the pathway to liberty. Apparently, those moments in the tub roused her from the drug-induced stupor that she’d been in since dad insisted she take the drugs that turned her mind into soup.

Theirs has been a terribly unhealthy relationship virtually all her life. But when her mother was still alive, she may have had a protector. But Esther suggests that early on, she was sexually abused.

The Dying is a complicated tale that boils down to the Prof being a pedophile who also enjoys picking fresh ‘fruit’, meaning his most innocent female students and ‘introducing’ them to sex.

Among those he has abused is one of Esther’s best friends, a young woman who mysteriously disappeared. We find this out after Esther gets lucid and begins to fight back with bitter truths that her dad doesn’t want to hear.

Like her accusation that he had a hand in her best friend’s disappearance. And that he’s also responsible for her mother’s death. Technically, she died of cancer but Esther can’t help correlating her mother’s demise and his abuses of her and other young women.

But the other fact that doesn’t come out until Clare regains her clarity of mind is that he is mentally tortured by his past and the fact that his parentage is beyond incestuous. His dad had set the precedent for pedophilia in the family by having his own incestuous history with his daughter who then turns out to be the Prof’s own mom! What that means is that his dad fathered both his daughter (Prof’s mom) and the professor as well.

One can’t help feeling the playwright, who himself is a university lecturer, had an underlying bone to pick with senior profs who (both locally and globally) have affairs with their students. This professor is a manipulative monster and egotistic academic who turns young women into ‘his toys’ as Esther puts it.

By the time her father's drugs wear off, Esther is ready for revenge. It takes the form of her announcing that she knows about his unnatural parentage. But even more painful for the man is the way, after he brings out the sisal rope for lynching his own child, she turns the scene around and seizes it to commit her own suicide.

She almost succeeds but for some reason, this man who’d claimed Death desirable, decides to jump in and save her life.

It is a problematic ending that raised many questions during the ‘Q and A’ that followed the play. Having the playwright on hand helped since some were not satisfied with the show ending as it did.

Ironically, Dr Mbogo admitted the story was unfinished; but in his self-effacing style, he added he couldn’t decide what came next. So, it’s technically a cliff hanger. But that might change the next time we see the show.