Martin Kigondu as Charlie and Brian Acholla as Harry in ‘Staircase’ at Phoenix. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
What you need to know:
From next Wednesday through Sunday (November 25-29), the Bayimba Cultural Foundation, which co-founded the international festival with the Sundance Institute East Africa, will play host to thespians from Belgium, Iraq, Kosovo, Slovenia, Uganda and Kenya.
Just knowing there’s an International Theatre Festival running in Kampala for the second year in a row should spur Kenyan playwrights to work harder to prepare new scripts which could potentially get into next year’s Theatre Festival.
It would mean that they, like Sitawa Namwalie’s cast, will be performing next to theatre companies from all over the world.
From next Wednesday through Sunday (November 25-29), the Bayimba Cultural Foundation, which co-founded the international festival with the Sundance Institute East Africa, will play host to thespians from Belgium, Iraq, Kosovo, Slovenia, Uganda and Kenya.
The only Kenyan playwright to be selected this year to showcase her poetic play, Room of Lost Names at KITF is Sitawa who’s assembled a fabulous cast, including director Nyambura Waruingi, to perform this coming Friday night, November 27 at Uganda’s National Cultural Centre.
Nairobi theatre-lovers can this afternoon watch a preview of Room of Lost Names, which stars Mkamzee Mwatela, Nick Ndeda and Mugambi Nthiga among others, from 2pm at the Alliance Francaise. It’s a fascinating script that blends indigenous folklore and epic poetry with an underlying suspense that comes from the play being essentially a murder mystery.
But Sitawa is not the only Kenyan woman to have an ambitious approach to script-writing that aims to put themes relevant to Kenyans into a larger creative context. Mkawasi Mcharo-Hall’s original play, Puma, also opens tonight after taking a few days off from its initial opening last week.
The Kenya National Theatre is the venue that would seem to be perfect for Mkawasi’s 35-member cast to stretch out and take full advantage of the new light, sound and stage systems installed two months ago.
But since then, KNT hasn’t received the support or the budget it deserves from the Government, specifically from the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports.
Somehow the Ministry didn’t get the message that President Uhuru Kenyatta (who performed on the old National Theatre stage himself in a musical by Suzanne Gachukia many years ago) sent out when he not only re-opened the National Theatre but also invited world renowned Kenyan writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo, to confirm the special significance of the theatre.
Those constraints have sadly reduced the initial lustre of the renovated theatre in the eyes of some Kenyan theatre-lovers. Nonetheless, Mkawasi’s production is ingenious as is the acting by Gilbert Lukalia among many other outstanding cast members.
Puma’s script couldn’t be more timely as it grapples with a number of issues often on the lips of Kenyans such as the fate of internally displaced people, the plight (and plague) of street children and the hypocrisy of some members of the clergy.
Mkawasi has also found a place in her cast for children from Kibera ‘slum’ as well as for theatre students, lecturers and even a choreographer from Kenyatta University, all of whom add to the vitality and veracity of the show. Puma will be staged both this weekend and the next.
Meanwhile, at Phoenix Theatre, Martin Kigondu and Brian Acholla co-star in Staircase, a sensational story about two middle-aged men who’ve lived and worked together as barbers for the past twelve years.
Directed by Kigondu who also plays Charlie opposite Acholla as Harry, theirs is an intimate portrait of two good friends whose friendship is somehow at a crossroads.
Harry has been the stable force in their friendship, giving Charlie a new trade after the one-time TV celebrity-actor lost his job.
Charlie has a slight superiority complex, which is actually a cover-up for the inferiority he feels for having been jailed once for two years and now has received a court summons to defend himself against a charge similar to the one that got him jailed.
Charlie has got an emotional volatility that Kigondu dramatises with full effect. His moodiness contrasts sharply with the cool-headed Harry who has his own issues, including the loss of his hair to some uncommon malady, which is why he wears a shower cap throughout the show.
It’s almost incidental that the two men are gay since their story could be about any two close friends confronted with crises of their own making, which hit a crescendo as the play unfolds. It’s a deeply moving script which the two actors perform with sensitivity and a peculiar mix of hostility and affection.
