When life has no meaning, dare to make your own
Every Brilliant Thing, a one-woman show (with the help of much of the audience) performed by Kenyan-born writer and actress Davina Leonard, took place at the Alliance Francaise on Sunday, February 18. The play was directed by John Sibi-Okumu (pictured).PHOTO | DIANA NGILA
What you need to know:
- Having the main character as a young person and her growth over the years, was a particularly clever touch as we are enabled to observe so much more on the human psyche.
- The use of audience interaction all through the play also worked, creating a closer sense of intimacy among people who were effectively strangers, and immersing everyone into it all the more.
You are seven years old. Your mother is in hospital following an attempt to commit suicide. When you ask why, you are told it is because she feels she has nothing worth living for. Earnestly wanting to solve this problem, you embark on putting together a list of things worth living for. You include ice-cream, water fights, staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV, danger mouse; everything thing that looks brilliant and beautiful in your eyes. It goes on till 300. Later, it will hit the million mark. You unconsciously make it your life-long mission to keep your mother alive and so you keep on expanding the list into your adulthood.
How heart-breakingly touching is this? This is the premise of the Duncan Macmillan’s play Every Brilliant Thing. A one-woman show (with the help of much of the audience) performed by Kenyan-born writer and actress Davina Leonard, it took place at the Alliance Francaise on Sunday, February 18. The play was directed by John Sibi-Okumu.
Rather than the happy-go-lucky story that the title suggests, it instead is an extremely intense one, the harrowing themes of depression, suicide and meaninglessness in life couched in occasional humour and presented ever so tenderly and identifiably. Through the narrator, we see and empathise with the challenge human beings can find themselves in, of making meaning, of finding reasons to go on, as they progress along the life journey.
The character, whose name we never get to know, is extremely endearing. Her reaction to her mother’s illness is not to collapse into a pile of misery, she instead tries to help. Making the list is the first thing that comes to her mind. Even though just seven years old, she does not become self-indulgent and wallow in self-pity; she instead steps up to the responsibilities her mother is no longer able to manage, and takes them up herself. While it means that more often than not she forgets to eat and wears different socks and dirty clothes to school, she is still in her power and has not surrendered to the situation.
Having the main character as a young person and her growth over the years, was a particularly clever touch as we are enabled to observe so much more on the human psyche. The use of audience interaction all through the play also worked, creating a closer sense of intimacy among people who were effectively strangers, and immersing everyone into it all the more. The play originally started out as a monologue titled Sleevenotes, which is available online for anyone curious enough to want to read it.
One of the problems we have in Kenya is that we have not been able to come up with our own theory on the meaning of life. We are still using the anachronistic template of Christianity where life is taken to be about being born to serve God, avoiding sin, then dying and ending up in either heaven or hell forever. This template, unfortunately, has too many holes and discrepancies in it and seekers of truth will eventually see beyond the veil of comfort it gives. Life is far more complex than this and as a society, we must start coming to our own conclusions and realisations of what life really is and more importantly, what we want it to be, in this particular age and time.
