By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (7.23.2023)
They may 📿 the
youngest performing arts company to join Nairobi’s burgeoning theatre scene.
Dancing
Fingers staged theirs premiere performance last Friday night at the
Professional Centre, the home where the troupe’s founder-playwright and
producer Alby Ng’ung’a got his first taste of theatre in the presence of one
James Falkland. He never became a big-name actor, like Ian Mbugua or John Sibi
Okumu.
“But I loved
watching the way James brought theatre to life, and I took him as a role model
that I hoped to one day emulate,” Ngunga told BD Life on the opening night of The
Broken, a script that he wrote for this occasion.
It's a
murder mystery, layered with several sub-themes, including sex trafficking and
the exploitation of women, infidelity, and mental illness.
The story
begins and ends with women weepers, which is always a problem for me when the
tears carry on too long. It’s especially annoying when it takes that much
longer to find out what all the angst is about. Gradually we find out that
several murders have been committed and the police have been investigating and
even interrogating suspects using torturous tactics that start off the
screaming. And at this early juncture, we cannot really tell whether the
torturers are cops or criminals or one in the same thing.
Then the
scene shifts and the weeper replaces the screamer. We find that she has grounds
for being upset. Clemintine had been a university student but her professor had
recommended that she join Madam Sabina in her brothel which she does, although
we don’t know if she went their by choice or if her ‘prof’ Dr David had powers
of persuasion that are unfathomable. Either way, Clemintine may have been raped
in the night possibly on her way to work. In her distress she calls her
professor, but he has no mercy and tells her to bug off. She then returns to
the brothel but Sabina also refused to even allow her back into a place that at
one time was her home. So she’s stranded, and the next thing we know she goes
missing.
Cut to more
weeping, this time it’s her mom who intuits that her daughter is in trouble and
yet she can’t reach Clemintine by phone. Meanwhile, her husband, Clem’s dad is
out messing around with other women. But by the time he gets home, his wife is
near to hysteria, having been unable to make phone contact with her only child.
It takes them quite a while but they finally decide to head to town to look for
the good professor David. He’s the one who recommend Clemintine come to his
university. And unbeknown to everyone except Sabina, he’s the one at the heart
of a sex trafficking scheme, finding vulnerable university students and getting
them to go work for Sabina. Then who knows what happens to them.
David’s wife,
Clara is a police mortician who works closely with Dr Msoo, the man who has
serious mental issues such as schizophrenia, and a kind of mental mania that
has led to his grabbing girls like Clementine and keeping them secretly for his
personal use. Otherwise, he is having an affair with Clara, something that
David discovers by chance, and feels deeply wounded and betrayed by it.
In any case,
the police chief inspector is hot on the trail of the criminal who’s been
killing young women. He visits Madam Sabina who he believes might have some
connection with the killer. But not even she can imagine how any man she knows
is a serial killer. He also meets with Mama and Baba Clemintine and eventually
gets to the police mortuary where Clara has an office. The police Inspector
heads to Dr Msoo’s home. He arrives after we have discovered Clemintine is not
dead, but locked away in the doctor’s basement. The extent to which Msoo’s schizophrenia
has rendered him mad as a hatter. Once he hears a knock on his door, he rushes
to hid Clemi back in the basement. But the Inspector isn’t fooled by Msoo’s
lucid moments. What we know is that the doctor hallucinates. That’s how we
understand the dead girl on the dissection table who rises from the dead and
haunts Dr Msoo who is freaked out by what he imagines to be true. The corpse
seems to be telling him he will rot in Hell. It’s shortly thereafter that the
Inspector arrives and arrests Msoo. Hell could be a maximum security prison for
him if a jury finds him guilty of rape, murder, and kidnapping Clemintine and
others.
Playwright
Nganga was brave to premiere with such a complicated plot, which worked
relatively well. But it required better direction since one felt the cast was
flailing a bit and needed clarity as to their character development. But
overall, Dancing Fingers made a good effort and looks prepared to improve as we
all aim to do.
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