LEO FINDS A NEW HOME, PUPPETRY AT ITS BEST

Leo’s search for a new home’ is the first theatrical production that was not only open to the public as we saw last Monday afternoon when scores of school children came streaming into Peponi House in Westlands to watch this heartwarming, witty, and fabulously original play.

It was also on the official program for the UNEP Climate Conference which opened the same day as the play, which is part puppet show, part musical complete with lively music and marvelous dancing fit for children to come up and join in.

“Several members from the EU (European Union) delegation to Kenya came to watch the show today,” Leo’s creator and director, Kasia M tells BDLife shortly after the 4pm performance. She adds that the EU delegration to Kenya (EUDK) is helping her produce the production largely because of ‘Leo” makes such a convincing statement about plastics polluting our oceans. It’s also a show that is child-friendly, interactive, and focused on capturing the attention of children with a clearcut message that plastic pollution does terrible damage threatening the very existence of whole species, but we can all play our part to end it. In fact, there is a point in the puppets show when one of the puppeteers invites the children to go out into the auditorium and collect plastics for recycling. This they do, and clearly love becoming part of the performance.   

One scene that illustrates just how life-threatening plastics are to the oceans takes place in the operating room of Dr Blade. The show itself is so fantastic and fresh that one’s not surprised when a    shipwreck is unearthed after a huge storm and Leo meets a multitude of creatures who have made the ship their home. But then, the scene shifts and the ship opens up into Dr Blade’s clinic. Leo and his new friends the eels are looking for Mary, their eel sister. They find her getting her stomach cleared as Dr Blade who pulls out many meters of plastic that she’d swallowed. Then then there’s a big celebration.  

But before any of this takes place, Leo has to be born. The first scene of the show has a tortoise egg cracking open, and a nameless tortoise soon-to-be-named Leo emerges and realizes he must find a new home since his first one, the egg, is gone. Shortly after Leo’s puppet emerges, his human stand-in Tiram Padam appears. They’ll stay together from then on, but one is meant to feel the puppet is leading the person holding his stick, not vice versa. It’s tricky since it’s a puppeteering unlike what most people think of as a conventional puppet show. But the innovations that Kasia interjects into her puppetree are more nuanced, daring, and liberating.

Tiram has understood this quality of freedom which he has been developing since last June when Leo first came on the theatre scene working with Aperture Africa. Since then, Kasia has made major revisions in her script, aimed at sending out a stronger, clearer, and more engaging, interactive message. At the same time, she has streamlined her set, creating underwater garbage mountains made out actual trash that she collected from Nairobi’s many junk yards and garbage  pits. So her underwater mountains have everything in them from wheel plates and side mirrors to an old jiko stove and a rusty old bicycle. Her oceanic waters, including the turbulent ones that nearly drowned Leo before he got swept up onto land had his first encounter with a human being. Before that moment, Leo believed with all the other creatures he had met that humans were their enemy because they were the worst plastic polluter. It was all their junk, especially their plastics which were bringing the biggest problems to the planet, even to the fish in the sea,

But Leo encountered other threats on his journey, like the sharks who were looking forward to eating Leo for lunch. It was not to be, but one crocodile came very close to munching Leo head-first. One shark actually had a good grip on Leo’s head and neck.  But then there was a problem. None of Leo’s new fish friends knew what had interrupted that one last munch but it gave them a few moments in which to grab Leo from the clutches of the toothless shark and save his life.

Those fish who became Leo’s buddies were the crabs, eels, blowfish swordfish, snd of cours the sharks  These are the creatures that gave Leo a sense of purpose and identity  and helped to make him feel good just being among them.