Saturday, March 29, 2014
Special birthday gift for award-winning Coast playwright
Kuldip Sondhi, proprietor of Reef Hotels. Photo/ Gideon Maundu.
Beach Access, the award-winning play by
nonagenarian Kuldip Sondhi, staged this past weekend at Mombasa’s Reef
Hotel, was just as fresh a production as it was in 1997 when it won the
BBC radio playwriting competition and got produced both on BBC radio and
at the Mombasa Little Theatre Club.
The topics tackled
by Sondhi, 90, are just as timely, relevant and provocative today as
they were back then: namely land-grabbing, corruption, and interracial
affairs.
Sadly, little has changed since 1996 when Sondhi was first inspired to write Beach Access.
Having
experienced the corruption and land-grabbing first hand, and also
having seen middle aged white women seducing young beach boys (as Helga
does Hamisi in the play), his script, just published in paperback, has
an impact that is both personally and socially profound.
Last
weekend’s production by The Theatre Company was slightly disappointing.
Chalk it up to ‘artistic licence’ but there were so many alterations of
Sondhi’s original script that one felt this was an entirely different
play.
The first big switch was replacing the white
woman with an African. Not that Stephanie Maseka wasn’t lovely as Helga;
but the shock value of seeing a middle-aged European woman seduce a
humble Swahili beach boy was all but lost.
The other
major shift was bringing the ‘punch line’ scene, (what Sondhi describes
as his signature ‘twist’ at the end of his play), up to the opening
scene of the play, which meant that most of the play became a flashback,
which wasn’t the playwright’s intent.
Again one can
chalk it up to the artistic licence of TTC director Keith Pearson, but
in a sense, it rendered the rest of the play anti-climactic. It also
removed the shock value of discovering Helga drowned.
Staging of the storm that tipped Helga’s canoe and tossed her overboard was imaginative and inventive.
But
then when Hamisi became a storyteller, explaining how Helga drowned to
his advocate, Ms Hassan (Mercy Dali), again it wasn’t the writer’s wish
to have the advocate be a female since it wasn’t realistic either then
or even now.
Gender sensitivity
Perhaps this decision was meant to illustrate TTC’s gender sensitivity, but if so, why did they have to delete the scripted part of Mrs Seth, the wife of the corrupt businessman, whose role in the home had served as a crucial bridge between father (Ashik Yusuf) and son (Awwab Mohammed).
Perhaps this decision was meant to illustrate TTC’s gender sensitivity, but if so, why did they have to delete the scripted part of Mrs Seth, the wife of the corrupt businessman, whose role in the home had served as a crucial bridge between father (Ashik Yusuf) and son (Awwab Mohammed).
Mr
Seth had persuaded the Administrative Chief (Anthony Mbithi) to help
him grab the beach access road that the beach boys used to reach their
curio kiosks on the sand. The AC and Seth intended to split the road
between them and then each give his share to his child.
The
AC’s daughter Cynthia (Sylviah Namusassi) had no problem grabbing the
land but Seth’s son Prem had serious misgivings about the land grab.
In
general, the casting of the show was very good, apart from Helga and
apart from making one of the beach boys a beach girl! “There is no such
thing as a ‘beach girl’,” I was told by one Mombasa resident.
In
an interview, Mr Sondhi made it clear that he felt the hope for change
in the way some Asians do business will come with the next generation,
especially those who have been educated and exposed to global standards
of fair trade.
Prem was meant to represent that next
generation in the play since he had recently returned from studies
abroad and was critical of his father’s business practices, despite
Seth’s supposedly grabbing the beach access for his son.
Yet this son shows no clear sign of being the enlightened intellectual that he is in the script.
Finally,
because Helga is bumped off in the beginning of the play, the ending is
ambiguous, especially when Helga reappears on stage. One can’t be sure
if she really drowned or if she’s a ghost or figment of Hamisi’s (Muscat
Sayye) imagination.
Whichever way you see it, TTC
still staged a polished production. It was a show that seemed to satisfy
scriptwriter Sondhi, who celebrated his 90th birthday last weekend, and
seeing Beach Access staged again was a special gift for one of Kenya’s
pre-eminent playwrights, a man whose contribution to Kenya’s canon of
original plays will come to light once his other 16 scripts are
published.
No comments:
Post a Comment