A nation in limbo depicted flawlessly in latest Prevail Arts production

The artist in The Republic by Plato is nothing but an imitator whose creations are mock-ups with different viewpoints.

Aristotle built on this in Poetics and looks at art as realisation of external ideas traceable to our obvious love for imitation and the pleasure each of us feel once we begin to identify the resemblance.

Written and directed by Martin Kigondu, What Happens in the Night performed at Daystar University’s DAC Auditorium on October 14, 2017 breathtakingly takes this resemblance to a whole new level closer home.

What Happens in the Night is a stage play about Don, a retired mheshimiwa and his family vis-à-vis the events breaking out across Kenya.

Clearly, what you do for a living has a way of finding its way in your home.

Don’s elder child and daughter Ng’endo is a nurse and married to Kip, a guy who works in the arts, a writer/creative/hustler.

Don also has a son Roy, a news anchor who is reconsidering his choice of career.

Roy’s spouse, Jasmine is also a nurse and works in the same private hospital with Ng’endo.

After a period of abusing antidepressants, Roy made the decision to return her to their home presumably in the city to live with both Kip and his sister, Ng’endo.

Roy’s sister and Jasmine’s colleague would help look after her both at work and at home.

UNRAVELING LIMBO

2017 has not been good for many businesses and the arts are hard hit by the extreme electioneering campaigns, re-runs, picketing and the general pessimistic outlook around the nation.

Kip works in the art industry and his situation is not that good. He lives off his wife Ng’endo who has no qualms reminding him she’s paying all the bills in a fit of anger.

Ng’endo and by extension Jasmine are insulated from the ongoing Nurse’s strike by the fact that they work in a private hospital.

Roy on the other hand is a News Anchor, seemingly celebrated and at one time a professional journalist who loved his trade, informing the clueless public about everything sometimes to the chagrin of the newsmakers such as a pastor found pants down in a compromising position with a woman in a hotel somewhere, whose humanity and rights are lost in the thin line of media translation.

Ultimately, the story must be told no matter what. This weighs heavily down on Roy and his father’s hint he extricates himself from the clutter is finally taken at the end.

Ng’endo and Kip look like a great couple from the outside until What Happens in the Night starts peeling down the mask.

The day’s headlines, troubling history, perils of life, barrenness, mistakes that beget human and personal choices clash.

The clutter of their occupation is deposited right into their abode and the four including their father Don face nights that will unravel lots of hidden or ignored issues of life alongside the unreeling headlines and political situation facing the nation.

Nights that people should be dancing and having fun and generally sharing into the brevity of happiness according to Kip sees them making illegitimate deals, fornicating, raping, stealing and betraying as quipped by Ng’endo.

NATION IN PURGATORY

The nation and by extension homes are no longer full of life and happiness but mumbling men and women in various stages and diversities of pain, unable to decipher a way out of their discomfort or eke a common path for themselves. It is a nation in purgatory, that state Roy believes to be “the place you chill before you get into prison” or that place whose “next step is heaven” according to Ng’endo. Kip’s rendering of Google’s take on purgatory is that “place of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners expiating their sins before going to heaven” or his rational credence of purgatory as that state “when you are at a moment of cleansing and purifying that causes you some form of pain or regret”.

It can be surmised that the nights of What Happens in the Night are sheer painful moments of the Don family as they expiate their fears and sin and perhaps cleanse and purify themselves. A limbo-like feeling, one that permeates the entire performance is best captured in the words of Nick Ndeda as Kip:

“Most of the time I feel like an item in the lost and found office in some stadium after a huge concert. Not sure what the item is; perhaps boxers or maybe pretty girls stocking.

All that I know is that I belong to something bigger or something grand and beautiful but I’m now not sure if I’m important anymore”.

BALANCED EXECUTION

Martin Kigondu’s play tastefully and craftily fuses the burden of every Kenyan confused about what is happening in the nation in 2017 and dealing with their painful private demons at home that must be exorcised no matter what.

The masterfully threaded balance coalesced in an excellent performance so intense the audience had to be told twice the play was going for a break of five minutes.

The gifted cast included Nick Ndeda as Kip, Mourad Sadat as Roy, Chichi Seii as Ng’endo, Shiviske Shivisi as Jasmine and Salim Gitao as Don was intensely pulsating and impeccably effective in their explosive presentation they took your breath away.

UNRESOLVED ISSUES ACROSS THE BOARD

What Happens in the Night ends with lots of unresolved issues at a personal level, obviously by the playwright’s inspired design perhaps to mirror the state of unresolved issues in the country today.

Yet the clarion call seems domiciled in Don’s counsel to his son Roy that we must condition or “prepare the state for something to blossom” and find peace within first before trying to find “stillness out here” as we set ourselves for blessings; the beauty of conversations, laughter, warmth, joy and generally good things.

Martin also wrote and directed What Happens at Dusk in 2016 performed at the Kenya National Theatre - Ukumbi Mdogo.