Friends of Creative Arts shifts gears to ‘Revenge’ thriller

FCA’s Revenge with Xavier Nato as Derrick, Umi Rajeb as Mabel and Nick Ndeda as Ben. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU 

By MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

In Summary

• Incest isn’t a topic typically discussed in local productions, but Hilda’s flagrant affection for her brother is clearly unsettling to Mabel.

Friends of Creative Arts fans may well have been unsettled by what they saw last weekend when the theatre company staged Revenge at Alliance Francaise.

That’s because FCA is best known for providing loads of light-hearted laughs, only this time there was just one comedic element, delivered by Xavier Nato who played Derrick, the slightly lecherous landlord of Ben (Nick Ndeda) and Mabel (Umi Rajeb).

They are the married couple who just moved to the countryside ostensibly to help Mabel recover from a nervous breakdown she had recently had. She’d been hospitalised, but was just released.

But nothing is what it seems in Revenge. Not only does Mabel seem delusional and paranoid, one can’t tell if she’s still sick or if there’s a covert scheme to mentally manipulate her back into breakdown mode or possibly something worse.  

I didn’t consider the latter option until almost the end of the play when certain facts came to light which had been alluded to, but which didn’t seem particularly pertinent to the storyline. What hadn’t been obvious until latent clues were revealed was that Ben and Mabel had been having troubles in their marriage from the outset.

It’s only when Ben’s sister Hilda (Lizz Ngugi) shows up at the farm house that it is clear there are peculiar things going on, particularly between the brother and sister whose relationship seems stunningly incestuous.

Incest isn’t a topic typically discussed in local productions, but Hilda’s flagrant affection for her brother is clearly unsettling to Mabel. I don’t want to give away the plot twists in Revenge since FCA is likely to revive it after a while, and nobody appreciates a spoiler.

Suffice it to say, Mabel didn’t really have a relapse; she had sensed that there was something amiss, although she hadn’t fully understood that a covert plot had been orchestrated to make her feel she was going mad. It was only when she began to piece together the subtle scheme that her situation unravelled and the truth was revealed.

Revenge is a fascinating psychological thriller that’s a far cry from what FCA normally does, which is to provide feather-light, escapist entertainment that one need not think too seriously about. Their shows are usually a bundle of laughs, but Revenge doesn’t fit that bill.

Instead, it makes you think and think again to figure out ‘whodonit’ and what you missed when the clues were right before your eyes.

Meanwhile, it was amazing how similar the two different performances could be, especially when they took place right next door to one another and simultaneously last Friday night.

Stir City at Alliance Francaise and Ololosokuan III (O3) at Goethe Institut were coming from separate parts of the world, each speaking in a range of different languages, and each using multimedia to tell a story about the history of their homeland. Both stories are about Africa: Stir City about South Africa and O3 about East Africa, more specifically about the Maasai in what would become Kenya.

Both are stories told through a mixture of music, hip hop and jazz, song, spoken word and dance. But then we could also see subtle differences between the two shows. For instance, Stir City used more technology than O3, including a camera that reached into the audience and threw images back onto screens on the stage.

Stir City also used mostly techno-sounds provided while O3 featured live music — bongos, a beautiful flute and voices and just one electric guitar. O3 wove together a series of stories that had been passed down orally from generation to generation and then shared with a neighbour and friend of the Maasai, Checkmate Mido.

But the biggest difference between the two was that O3 combined mime, modern African dance, spoken word and song to tell a powerful drama about one facet of Maasai history that is hardly known.