New thought-provoking original scripts gain ground in local theatres

Aid or Do Nothing, the original script by Canadian actor-playwright Robin Denault which just completed a successful three week run at Phoenix Theatre, raised a number of unsettling questions, and left quite a few of them unanswered.

But the ambiguity served the writer and his three-man cast well as the story, often told in flashback, was deliberately meant to disturb and raise troubling topics ranging from refugees and terrorism to the tenuous living–and dying--conditions that millions of people around the world find themselves in today.

Denault has never been an aid worker himself although during his years living in Kenya he had countless occasions in which to observe their conduct and even inquire into their motives for going into the global business of humanitarian aid work.

That sort of primary research on the writer’s part is one reason the tone, tempo and troubling issues raised in Aid or Do Nothing seemed to ring true.

There are only three men in the cast, the two professional aid workers – one local, Kenneth Maina (Maina Olwenya) the other foreign, William Brandt (Robin Denault) and one policeman (Samson Psenjen) who may or may not be corrupt.

There is also one woman in the cast. Zietun Salat plays a beautiful but ostensibly mute Somali woman who seduces the unsuspecting white man into behaving recklessly and betraying some of the most basic tenets of his job.

Denault may also be accused of behaving recklessly and radically since his play implicitly raises doubts about the legitimacy of the whole humanitarian aid enterprise.

Echoing many of the critical issues raised years ago when Graham Hancock wrote Lords of Poverty and more recently when Dambiso Moyo wrote Dead Aid along similar lines, it’s mainly the Kenyan aid worker Maina who’s most explicit about his criticism of foreign aid and the ensuing donor dependency that it generates.

But it’s the expatriate, Brandt who ironically observes that all the efforts at so-called poverty alleviation are fake because if they actually succeeded, all the expats working in the field would lose their jobs.

Denault himself plays the ugly American who is so arrogant, accusational (primarily towards the policeman) and alienated from the local populations (including his fellow African aid workers like Maina) that he resorts to risking his own and others’ lives.

Surprising ‘whodunit’

But again, the incredible irony of the expat’s situation is that ultimately, when his conscience finally gets the best of him, it’s to the policeman (who he’d incessantly accused of corruption) that he confesses to and compels to hear the whole story of what actually transpired during those hours when he and Maina went missing from their northern Kenya refugee camp.

Set on a Spartan stage with only a few bits of furniture, Aid or Do Nothing relies on the remarkable acting skills of all the actors to sustain the suspense of the play and allow the story to unravel into a surprising ‘whodunit’.

It’s unlikely that the play will be restaged in Kenya very soon since the playwright plans to take his script down to South Africa where he is currently based.

Noting that he came back to Nairobi specifically to premier his new play here in the place where all the ideas come together, Denault may also take the show to Europe and North America.

But one wonders, if he is not able to take Psenjen and Olwenya with him for his next set of shows, how new performers will compare. That’s the producer-director-playwright’s next concern.

As for now, his Kenyan cast gave powerful performances that left many of us stunned with the way this thought-provoking story ends.

Meanwhile, this evening at the Italian Institute of Culture one more ‘world premiere’ of a brand new Kenyan play will be staged from 6:30pm in Westlands.

James Gathitu both scripted and stars in Crossing the Rubicon, a fascinating psychological thriller about a brilliant but schizophrenic Kenyan history professor whose hallucinations take him back in time to the period when Julius Caesar was emperor ruling the entire ‘civilised world’.

See himself

Produced by Gathitu, Lydia Githahu and Stephen Ikeda in cooperation with the Italian Institute of Culture, the play is set in present-day Kenya but the professor’s delusions lead him to see himself as Caesar, his wife (played by Brenda Achieng) as Cleopatra and his psychiatrist (played by Harold Wanyumba) as Mark Anthony.

Crossing the Rubicon will also run on Saturday, May 30 at the same time and place.

Then the following weekend, Festival of Creative Arts will stage Betrayal by Eliud Abuto at Alliance Francaise and Phoenix Players will open in All the Girls Together.