Theatre: Accidental Death of a Terrorist is highly recommended at Phoenix Players

Thin line between madness and how con men exploit legal system    

Inspector Bruno threatens the ‘mad man’ who’s not afraid in Accidental Death. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU 

               

By MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

Posted  Thursday, October 16  2014 at  19:23

In Summary

• What’s stunning is how easily Phoenix Players adapted Fo’s play to a Kenyan context.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist by the Italian playwright Dario Fo was a brilliant political comedy that gave new meaning to the comedic.

It not only made fun of madness in ways that were irreverent, ridiculous and hilarious. It also revealed what a fine line there can be between being mad and being an incredibly imaginative, shrewd and calculating con man who knew how to manipulate the legal and judicial system to get away with all manner of apparent madness as a means of exposing corruption, police brutality, impunity and murder.

What’s stunning is how easily Phoenix Players adapted Fo’s play to a Kenyan context. Changing just one word in the title, Accidental Death of a Terrorist opened last Friday night at Phoenix, raising similar issues and meriting just as much praise as Fo’s original play.

Directed by Harry Ebale who also plays the medically certified ‘madman’, he too could truly be insane or he might actually be sane, lucid and rational, only playing the part of a mental maniac for his own reasons.

Ebale (who’s assembled a cast including Samson Psenjen, Sahil Gada, Martin Kigondu and Esther Muturi) keeps his audience guessing from start to end. We’re never sure if he’s mad or not. What’s certain is he’s outrageously audacious and apparently schizophrenic as he enacts an exquisitely crafted repertoire of characters that clearly leaves local police looking as frazzled, foolish and out of control as the madman might well be.

Hauled into the Central Police Station on charges he knows he can beat since he’s already done so a dozen times, he’s got the right medical records to retain a clean slate. His records show he is nuts. So legally, he cannot be charged since he’s been diagnosed as essentially ‘out of his mind’.

Is he really? He’s nutty enough to exasperate police inspector Bruno (Psenjen) so much that he throws the maniac out of his office. He can’t cope with this slippery maniac who can switch identities at the drop of a hat.

But what makes the madman’s quick-changing character so stunning is not just that he can credibly shift from persona to persona effortlessly. It’s also that he does it with so much audacious flare that he leaves the cops befuddled.

If he’s not insane, the game he’s playing is extremely dangerous since we gradually grasp that his interrogators are the type who torture, maim and kill in the name of finishing “terrorists.”

So either he’s immensely brave or utterly insane since he seems to know that both his interrogators (Kigondu and Gada) are complicit in the “accidental” death of a matatu tout who’s been deemed a ‘terrorist’.

The madman manages to fool his would-be interrogators up until Inspector Bruno arrives in the Superintendent’s office and eventually recognises the maniac who Bruno is convinced is nothing but a conman. By that time, the maniac has already recorded inadvertent confessions from his interrogators who admit they tossed the manamba (tout) ‘terrorist’ out the window; he didn’t commit suicide.

On the contrary, it was convenient for the two to eliminate an innocent (until proven guilty) man only to report to the media that he was a terrorist who killed himself.

The other accusations that the maniac makes against the cops and the whole political establishment are even more damning, since he alleges the police are tools of politicians who need terrorists to wage war against the State to justify curtailing people’s freedoms and human rights.

Implicitly what Fo and Phoenix Players are exposing is the whole idea that the so called war on terror is actually a right wing ploy to deprive people of their democratic rights by rousing fear of terrorists (not cops serving politicians’ interests) who supposedly plant bombs in buses and public places like Gikomba.

And while the allegations of the madman seem unbelievable, the play itself reveals that such claims are plausible.