The phrase, “Blessed be the fruit” is a form of greeting, usually answered by “May the Lord open” in The Handmaid’s Tale series. The phrase also denotes that a handmaid will receive the blessing of a child, and in this case, it is an expression of potency among the handmaids of Gilead – Margaret Atwood’s totalitarian dystopian world.
However, in Blessed Be the Fruit, the Kenyan play staged at the Kenya National Theatre on 2 December, director Martin Kigondu takes us through a harrowing tale of a teenage nun, Agnes (Lorna Lemi, Nairobby), who gets raped, becomes pregnant, and is suspected of strangled her baby just minutes after giving birth by herself in the convent in a quiet afternoon when all the nuns are busy attending mass.
Blessed be the Fruit is a three-hander play that also features Helena Waithera (House of Lungula) as Martha, a psychiatrist investigating this supposed infanticide, and Maryanne Nungo (Pepeta) as the elder nun Mother Mary.
For this play, the first thing that catches my eye the moment I walk into Ukumbi Mdogo at the Kenya National Theatre, is the drawing of a flower in the background. It’s a white flower, with a drop of blood. And that triggers your mind. You start thinking about the connection between the story and the stage props, as well as the costumes. Blessed Be the Fruit is an emotionally heavy play as we watch the life of a young nun unravel before us. Agnes has been through life’s unbearable circumstances. As a child, she was physically and emotionally abused by her mother, a drug addict and alcoholic who could strip her naked and burn her with cigarettes and hurled derogatory words at her. When her mother passed on, Agnes is “forced” to devote her life to God as a nun in a Catholic church convent, under the care of her aunt, the Mother Superior Mary.
A lot of things work in this play. The use of colours white and red, even in costuming, is thought-provoking as symbolism for purity or innocence and the corruption of it. Mother Superior wears a white headgear while Agnes has white rubber shoes, but her habit is tainted with blood from her hands and body. Martha has a white blouse, red coat, and black trousers. As Martha keeps investigating whether Agnes killed and dumped her newborn in a trash bag, it is also revealed that she was also abused in church as a young girl in church. This explains why she is very determined to know whether Agnes was raped by a priest and whether she strangled her newborn because of the self loathe and depression.
The acting is remarkable. Nungo brings out the complexity of Mother Superior, taking us through varying character arcs that only a dynamic actor like her can achieve. We laugh, we cry and we loathe her throughout the play. Nungo’s voice shakes the whole auditorium when she cries or rebukes Martha, or her niece, Agnes. Waithera plays Martha the psychiatrist in search for the truth with such composure even as she struggles with her past traumas. She seems unpredictable enough, especially when her mood when she decides to hypnotise Agnes to dig for the truth.
What needs revision or perhaps total scraping is the ending to the play, the part where Martha explains to us the plight of Agnes, just before the play ends. It would have worked better if these revelations were acted out on stage, and not expounded in a monologue. When narrated, it denies the audience the other dimensions or just narrows one’s imagination while trying to process the story being told.
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