Two wings of Brookhouse School staged satires for children this past week, each one derived from classical canons, one in film, the other in literature. And each was staged inside their school’s resplendent auditorium.
Brookhouse Karen opened first with “Dorothy and the Thief of Oz’, a children’s theatre adaptation of the Hollywood film classic, The Wizard of Oz.
It’s a fantasy about a Tin-man (Kimani Mugo), Lion (Robert Githinji), and Scarecrow (Christopher Waititu) who team up with a lost little girl from Kansas, Dorothy (Zainli Sisay), to find solutions to each of their heartfelt problems.
The play has a similar theme and storyline, although it’s set sometime after the original problems have been resolved, and a new set of issues have to be solved.
Meanwhile, Brookhouse Runda, working with children of the same age group as those in Karen staged Barbara Cohen’s adaptation of Chaucer’s 14th-century classic, Canterbury Tales.
Both plays are about groups on a journey either to solve problems (Oz) or to arrive at a religious site (Canterbury).
Both are ambitious scripts for 11-13-year-olds to dramatize, especially as the scriptwriters seemed to be writing for older youth.
And frankly, the stage adaptation of the Hollywood film classic presupposed that both the actors and the audiences were familiar with the film or at least with the storyline, which is not necessarily the case for most Kenyans.
So, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the jokes or references made that refer to the film. For instance, they might not know what’s so special about tinman’s heart and how he can still be walking around without it.
But whether you know the story or not, Dorothy’s story now is all about her quest to find the thief who stole the Tinman’s heart.
It’s imperative because, as we learned from the film, the heart is a symbol of love and the site where feelings of love, compassion, and empathy are all drawn from.
Dorothy had arrived on the day Tinman was meant to be wedded to his sweetheart. But without a heart, he has lost all interest in his fiancée and in getting married.
So, it’s actually the fiancée who begs Dorothy to get involved. From then on, Dorothy becomes a kind of girl detective, investigating who might have stolen his heart and why they did it.
It’s a clever storyline, and the cast handled it well except that some students spoke their lines so fast that some of us couldn’t hear what they were talking about.
Ironically, it seemed that the fast talkers had worked so hard to memorize the lines that they forgot to put more heart and feeling into those same words.
Meanwhile, the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury had chosen to tell stories on their journey, so the play includes a series of diverse short stories.
One was about thieves laying in wait for travellers whom they would rob and potentially kill which they did in one of the stories that got told and dramatized by Runda youth.
Yet however dark the stories in either play came off, the casts did not seem to have a problem dramatizing them.
And in any case, in ‘The Thief of Oz’, the discovery of ‘whodunit’ by Dorothy and her team was whimsical and quite fun.
The thief was the Cacao man from the Kingdom of Chocolate. He had stolen Tinman’s heart because he too had the problem of living a shallow, unloving and thin-skinned life because chocolate people in this kingdom apparently have hollow bodies.
Thus, the Cacao-man wanted it for his wife. He was compelled to give back the heart. We don’t know what happened to him or to his wife after that, but Dorothy solved the case.
I guess the Cacaos can be considered ‘collateral damage’.
Otherwise, apart from the scripts and the storylines, the plays themselves had an amazing workforce supporting their shows.
For instance, the lighting was fabulous at both schools. It was the lights-man in ‘The Thief of Oz’ who enabled us to see the old-fashioned telephone operator working way up above the stage in the balcony.
The light beams directed us to see her and appreciate her role in the play.
The sound system was equally efficient as both casts were well ‘mic-ed’. The directors deserve to be commended for assisting their cast members to learn their lines well.
It was only one or two students didn’t take their time to ensure that their words would be heard and understood by their audience.
Equally, the costuming was impressive in both instances although several students at Karen apparently preferred wearing fancy dresses rather than role-specific costumes.
In contrast, in Runda, every cast member wore costumes that were supportive of their roles, be they performing as birds or human beings.
Ultimately, the best thing about both performances is that they reflect the parents' and school administration’s awareness of the value of imagination and the performing arts.
