READING OF KIGONDU’S MATCHSTICK MEN WORKED

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted December 10, 2022) There are stage productions, and then, there are stage Readings which only include the actors and the script. Readings are part of a larger creative process leading to what will become a full-scale production. When you get brilliant actors reading an equally outstanding script which has already been staged once or twice, the Reading can become a classic moment when the soul of the play comes to light. It leaves one wondering why more scripts do not undergo public ‘readings’, especially if they are produced as Esther Kamba did last Friday night when she invited her audience to stay after the Reading of Matchstick Man and speak to its playwright, Martin Kigondu. In the reading of his script, Sam Psenjin and Nick Ndeda gave much more than a simple read-through of a play that may soon become a film. It was upstairs at the Kenya Cultural Centre that the actors (two of Nairobi’s finest) took the plunge into the depths of Kigondu’s mentally fractured characters to give fascinating performances. Initially, it isn’t easy to figure out who is the patient and who’s the therapist in what we gradually realize is a mental asylum. Both Seth (Psenjin) and Fatili (Ndeda) are flawed. At the same time, both have moments when they are lucid and able to behave like professional shrinks, psychiatric workers challenging the other to get down deep into the recesses of his mind. Be assured, Matchstick Men is no comedy although there is an undercurrent of wit starting with the way the actual patient, Seth, puts on the doctor’s white medical jacket and behaves as if the jacket makes him that man.

But the psychological games that Seth plays frustrate Fatili at the outset. It is understandable that during the ‘Q and A’ that followed the readings, more than one inquisitor in the audience hadn’t found Kigondu’s characters the easiest characters to understand. Fortunately, Martin was on hand to explain how he’d wanted to explore issues of mental health in his play. But that required the portrayal of one character, Seth, who was mentally imbalanced, to be reached through the mental touch of another equally flawed character. In fact, both men had effectively blocked memories of events in their lives that had been traumatizing. So much so that Seth didn’t recall that he was effectively responsible for his father’s death. As a child he had watched his father turn his mother into “a punching bag”, but one day it was too much and the little boy pushed his dad down a long flight of stairs, at the bottom of which the old man was found dead. He was never seen as culpable since his mother swore it was suicide. But that event subsequently led to his amnesia about everything associated with it. Ultimately, we find out that Fatili had understood the mental blockages in Seth’s mind and felt it was imperative the truth be exposed so the man could regain control over his life. But before that could take place, we first had to learn how Seth and Fatili were somehow related. It’s because Fatili fell in love with Seth’s crazy sister with whom he had a child. It’s not quite clear what happened to the sister although she was with Fatili four years and these were terribly frustrating times for him. So much so that he apparently had beaten her bloody and the court thus denied him access to their child. This distressed him a great deal. But he too had blocked the memory of his deeds of domestic violence which were also brought out in the reading.

Eventually, Fatili gives a full disclosure, first, of his identity as a psychiatrist who had concealed his professional identity from Seth intentionally for weeks. What’s more, he had wanted to heal Seth by helping him break through his mental blocks and face the realities of his history. His motives were not purely altruistic, however since he has only one means of regaining access to his child. And that is to have a family member of his ‘wife’s sign documents that would confirm his paternity. In the end, Fatili gets both of these, so the reading ends on a relatively happy note. It resolves loose ends, but doesn’t quite satisfy. In any case, one must applaud Kigondu for interweaving several significant moments in Kenya’s post-independent history, such as the 1982 coup plot and the 2007-2008 post-election violence as factors contributing to Kenyan deteriorating mental health. All in all, a brilliant piece of writing.