Greed and blind obsession the dominant themes in new play
Cornelius (Justin Karunguru) the comedic con man on stage in Seth Busolo’s play ‘‘Borrowed Life.’’
Photo/MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
By Margaretta wa Gacheru
Posted Thursday, April 17 2014 at 18:13
Posted Thursday, April 17 2014 at 18:13
In Summary
- Borrowed Life is a play that originally offered a sensitive portrait of a troubled woman (the likes of whom also dwell in our midst) so plagued with insecurity and need to compensate with cash and all the status symbols money can buy that she is prepared to risk her family, including a new born child.
Watching the remake of a brilliant and thought-provoking play can be like watching the sequel to a blockbuster movie.
The plots may be similar but the follow up is rarely as mind-boggling or stunning as the first time round.
This is what happened with Seth Busolo’s Borrowed Life
that premiered last month at the Michael Joseph Centre and got restaged
last weekend at the Alliance Francaise due to popular demand.
It revolves around one woman’s greed, naked
ambition and blind obsession to get rich quickly using other people’s
money, having devised her own mini pyramid scheme.
But there was a fundamental shift in the story the
second time round largely due to the feedback that Wholesome
Entertainment Productions (meaning the playwright Seth Busolo and the
play’s producer Daisy Busolo) sought during their show’s first run.
Some members in the first audiences found the play
“too serious” and “not funny enough”. They wanted a few more laughs and
less dramatic indepth probing into the motivation and the methods of
how a seemingly successful woman like Melissa (Manda Khabetsa) could go
from being a loving wife and popular broadcast journalist to a crooked
con artist who ultimately gets caught running a racket comparable to a
Bernie Madoff-styled pyramid scheme.
When Melissa finally gets caught, she’s in debt to
the tune of Sh40 million. Her soft-hearted, long-suffering husband Adam
(Brian Ogola), who has been through a scam similar to this one with his
wife once before, doesn’t have the cash to pay her bail so the play
ends with the very pregnant Melissa left to give birth to their first
baby while still in jail.
These are sobering notions but with a cast as
competent as Wholesome’s, the play was not only conceivable and
credible, it also mirrored a social reality that operates both in Kenya
as well as elsewhere globally.
What was unfortunate about the staging the second
time was that the Busolos took seriously the feedback that called for
more laughs and escapist entertainment and less serious social realism.
The first production of Borrowed Life had a fair amount of ingenious comic relief in the shape of Cornelius (Justin Karunguru), the jua kali
mechanic and small scale con man who devised his own set of tricks to
get rich quick, and then show off his spoils —shiny new status symbols
like a big, brand new car and a full set of pricey golf clubs.
The other sleazy but amusing character in a
schizophrenic sort of way is Mr Juma (Timothy Ndiisi), the sinister
shylock whose mafia-like tendencies are thinly cloaked by his humorous
edge and apparent good will.
But where we saw the biggest shift between the
first and second version of the play is in the Busolo’s rewriting of the
script to give more air time to the light hearted banter between
Cornelius the con and Juma the shrewd lethal crook who not only deceives
naive teenage girls like Melissa’s 19-year-old niece Jessica (Joyce
Maina), but Juma is also renowned for eliminating debtors who don’t pay
up in good time.
By adding more levity to a serious dramatic script
aimed at highlighting the problematic nature of greed and Melissa’s
penchant for plotting what she thought were clever pyramid schemes,
Busolo falls prey to almost losing the critical essence of his play.
Borrowed Life at its core isn’t an
escapist production. It’s a play that originally offered a sensitive
portrait of a troubled woman (the likes of whom also dwell in our midst)
so plagued with insecurity and need to compensate with cash and all the
status symbols money can buy that she is prepared to risk her family,
including a new born child.
By swapping that dramatic core for laughs, Busolo
sacrifices one of the most interesting elements of the play, Melissa’s
psychological descent from simply stealing funds from her chama to building a whole business based on fraudulent investing in the foreign exchange market.
- New operator sparks war for airport catering billions
- Transporter accuses CMC of selling defective buses
- Kenyan hotel among the world’s top ten
- Hard times for civil servants as allowances gravy train is stopped
- Equity Bank first quarter profit up 21pc
- KCB joins Equity in plans to form holding company
- Would legalising prostitution be good for economy?
- CMC buyout ends as Al-Futtaim pays owners Sh7.5bn
- Builders cash in on rising demand for godowns by firms
- Jubilee lays ground for development of infrastructure
- Kenya Power plans fibre glass poles rollout to cut costs
- Kenya could postpone borrowing from international money market
- Kenya, Uganda reach deal on cross-border call rates
- Safaricom shares rise to all-time high
- Kenya to become middle-income state in September
No comments:
Post a Comment