LOOSE ENDS Draft

 Mavin kibocho was smart to entitle the play that he wrote, produced and staged last Saturday at kenya cultural centre.

He called it ‘Loose Ends’ which made sense since there are so many loose ends in this drama that one can’t decide whether the play is meant to be a mystery or if the playwright needs to head back to the drawing board and give his two characters more clarity of motivation.

The first confusion comes out soon after we meet the weeping woman, Una, who we learn her sister was recently murdered and police had just found her remains. Una’s tears are apparently for her sister, but the only reason we find this out is by the arrival of a mystery man who looks like a nuisance or a determined do-gooder. He sees the woman weeping and asks genuinely if he can help. But then, when she tells him to go away, he doesn’t. Why the persistence? It takes too long to find out that by some uncanny coincidence, he and the weeper, una, once had a passionate love affair. It is never explained how he doesn’t recognized Una despite the many years that have passed since they were together. Nor is it made clear how Una didn’t recognize her former lover initually. Or did she but pretended she did not? And if that was not the case, then what’s her motivation?

Dr b eventually suggested that una planned her game in advance of being seated somewhere just outside the doctor’s office. But before that hypothetical theory comes up, they both seem to get an ‘ah ha’ moment when they recognize one another. Una is transformed from being a crying hothead who’d shouted at the doctor to stop pestering her into a loving, affectionate girl who recalled the passion they had for one another. Meanwhile, there are all these imploring voices from inside his house. They come first from his wife, then from his young daughter, people who eventually keep the doctor fixed with his family and unprepared to run away with Una as she wants.

As far as character development, it’s the doctor who describes what happened to him when it was discovered he had an affair with a minor. (Una was 15 when they met and fell in love). There’s a trial where he is accused of being  pedifile anconvicte for it. Hiyears in prison, a chunk of which kept him in solitary confinement; the rest found him being beaten and tortured by fellow fell inmates who are dads with daughters who feel the fear of their baby girl getting raped by a pedifile like the doctor.

Una’s reaction to his story is as unrelenting as his when trying to waken one man’s care for a supposed stranger. she wants the two of them to revive their relationship and run away together. To him its no longer  an option. Besides, he tells her, if we did do as she wished, they would never be socially accepted. He would always be seen as the pediphile who assaulted a child.

It apparently infuriates Una that the doctor might love his wife and child more than her. Now we are starting to see a dangerous dimension of Una’s passionate. We haven’t learned enough about Una’s background to know her mental stability or lack thereof.  We heard briefly about her brother and sisters and apparently that they are all orphans, but even the story of her sister who was deemed a prostitute is never brought up again, therefore, another loose end.

But probably the biggest loose end of all is the relationship that Una and the doctor had and continue to have, despite the doctor ff. Una suggests that she has a child whose father I the doctor but he had never been told. That idea is also not developed so it’s yet another loose end.

And finally, it’s the last scene when we are left with a blackout and a radio announcement that the public and FBI are looking for a young woman who might have a motive for killing her former lover.

There seem to be many plays coming out with this cliff hanger ending. They seem to think it is clever. But to me, it’s the ultimate unresolved loose end that young theatre companies like to produce. But tome, they are a lazy man’s way of resolving an end that is crisp and clear and doing the easy nan thing. So we can at lleast congratulate Mavin for correctly identifying his play with the ultimate loose end which is death.