File | Nation Members of Heartstrings Kenya during a past play at Alliance Francaise. The cast is staging the comedy Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady at same venue.
By CLAY MUGANDA claymuganda@gmail.com
Posted Friday, November 25 2011 at 22:00
Posted Friday, November 25 2011 at 22:00
IN SUMMARY
- French Cultural Centre is currently hosting Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady, the latest rib-tickling production from Heartstrings Kenya
Wanjiku “Shiks” Karanja is a painfully beautiful and extremely funny actress who talks as fast as she walks — whether she is on the stage or on the streets.
In Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady, the latest rib-tickling production of Heartstrings Kenya, which is running at the French Cultural Centre, she is the-know-it-all young woman who tells people off in a mishmash of Kiswahili and English which should actually pass as the amorphous Sheng, but is not.
“When I was kujaing, I pitiad his digz but I did not pata him and then he kataad to jibuhis phone when I hollered.”
When delivered fast and sneeringly, those words are funny, but when you walk into an office and some painfully slim young woman tells you that the boss had “pitiadand he semad that you ngoja”, then it becomes annoying.
But that is what you are likely to hear among Kenya’s ‘Generation Y,’ whose skirts are shorter than their words and who could use the same short words they use in text messages in verbal conversations — if only they could pronounce them.
In days gone by, younger folk used to learn from the older folk, but in today’s Kenya, the latter are aping the former, in a manner of speaking, dressing, drinking, hugging, shouting and even protesting as Haki Yetu becomes a war cry when they have some pusillanimous issue which they kataad to resolve when they could.
Such scenes should be funny, but sadly, they are not — unless of course the person depicting them is Shiks, then we can laugh loudly before turning to the next person to ask what is the funny thing that we are laughing about.
Odd? No. In Kenya, we think fast. Afterwards. That is the underlying line in Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady, in which Shiks and 17 others are appearing.
A big cast you may say, but that is typical of Heartstrings Kenya’s comedic shows conceptualised by radio and television comic Daniel Ndambuki — and which run for days on end and register full houses because, apparently, Kenyans love to laugh at themselves, their oddities and peculiarities which make the plotlines for all those productions.
Characterised by a rambling stand-up comedian whose lines keep the audience on the edges of their seats while the set is being changed into another rambunctious scene, the Dan Ndambuki-conceptualised Heartstrings Kenya productions should run under the franchise of ‘Peculiar Kenyans’ because that is what they are all about.
The current instalment revolves around a dysfunctional family of nine — seven children and two parents, as a Kenyan pupil will explain — who stagger from one peculiarity to another as they depict Kenyans’ love for going against the grain of family values and laid down laws — and loving it.
It is only in Kenya where parents and their daughters and sons can troop to a pub for a drink after hours in order to placate the vacuous and rancorous father who threw his toys out of his pram because his sons professed their love for “my wife” but forgot his birthday.
It is also only in Kenya where laws are mere proposals, and as long as you know the police chief or any other big wig, you can break them or disregard them even if your life is in danger.
“You mean the police are out there because there is a bomb and yet you want us to leave?” a skimpily-dressed young man asks a harangued wait staff who let them in for “only one hour,” but cannot get them out because “we are paying and that bomb cannot harm us because my father knows the OCPD.”
In Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady, no one acts like a lady, that species which, together with gentlemen, ceased to exist within our borders immediately we gained independence and became a sovereign state where teachers are more comfortable yapping in the staffroom than shaping the minds of young men and women in classrooms.
Oh, the nine family members morph into teachers of a local school where Shiks cannot have an opinion because she is on teaching practice, where a certain teacher is known as Maasai Market because she dons a lot of locally-made jewellery, where a miniskirt-wearing female teacher is known more for her derriere than her teaching skills and where the father whose birthday had been forgotten spends the night in the school because his house in Syokimau was demolished, but he has a mistress whose upkeep he pays for.
That the comedy is “current” is not in contention, and neither is the fact that it is about the everyday us, typical Kenyans who secure bank loans to fund weddings while still paying the bills of high maintenance mistresses; who put up a businesses on a designated road reserves and then give the tunaomba serikali line when the government demolishes their structures.
To see Shiks in all her splendour and laugh your head off, make it to the FCC on Saturday and Sunday at 3pm and 6.30pm and again on December 2, 3, and 4.
Think Like a Kenyan, Act Like a Lady is directed by Victor Ber and Sammy Mwangi and if you miss it, do not say you were never told that it is the perfect stress reliever.
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