Review: Too Early for Birds’ ‘Badassery’ Reckons With the Deep Colonial Roots of Kenya’s Police Violence

There’s a sense of occasion at Loresho’s Jain Bhavan on the evening of Friday 20 June. Outside the auditorium, a behemoth crowd mills about, filling their eagerness and impatience with small talk and hot coffee. The ensemble cast of Foi Wambui, Mercy Mutisya, William Mwangi, Justin Mirichii, Tobit Tom, and Kiptoo Kirwa – none of them strangers to theatre stardom – are about to take to the stage for the opening night of Badassery, Too Early for Birds’ latest historical play about Kenya’s notorious crime scene of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. 

The show promised controversial tales of infamous criminals, their daring exploits, and the crime-busting legends like Patrick David Shaw, who hunted them down.

The setting is a bar. While a replica of the 1980s, the set is not transfixed to any time period and, like the characters, can travel through time, and even exist out of time. At times, the stage drifts in a dreamlike blue mist and smoky haze of a long-gone era; other times, it’s charged with the bright magnetic currents of today. 

Standing at the periphery of this set, under a subdued light, Foi Wambui as Olivia, a journalist hell-bent on publishing a controversial tell-all, opens with a solemn monologue that informs us that what we’re in for is more than just an entertaining history class. That this is not slapstick and farce but a confrontation with ourselves and our present.

“We’re a nation holding its breath,” she says.

Badassery stays true to Too Early for Birds’ time-tested formula: there’s no chasm between the audience and performer because in a Too Early for Birds production, there’s no such thing as an audience. While we see six characters on stage, Badassery actually has seven characters, the audience being the seventh – known as ‘The Baddie.’

I’ve come to realise this breaking of the fourth wall is not just a stylistic choice for the sake of it, but a reflection of the growing shift in the way we consume art. There’s an emerging need to eliminate the distance between art and the consumers of art, leading to the rise of immersive conceptual shows.  Art, especially performance art, is evolving into the practice of soliciting rather than distancing the audience, drawing them into the work of art as an intersubjective exchange. And Too Early for Birdsis at the forefront of this evolution.

Under Wanjiku Mwawuganga’s direction, Badassery weaves a dynamic blend of narrators, theatrical reenactments, and even time-travelling. Of the seven characters, only The Baddie, transfixed in 2025, is denied the gift of time travel. But that doesn’t mean we do not interact with the historical characters or participate in their events.

The narrations lead us through dimly lit bars, shadowy alleys, tense police raids, explosive shootouts, and emotionally charged moments across multiple timelines, drawing the audience into a visceral, lived experience. Through gripping reenactments, the play maps the brutal history of policing in Kenya, revealing the deep colonial roots of state violence and the moral ambiguities that persist. It asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: Has extrajudicial killing actually reduced crime? Can we truly say the law enforcer is an absolute good and the lawbreaker an absolute bad?

Badassery resists easy answers. It dismantles simplistic narratives, urging the audience to reckon with Kenya’s complex legacy of justice, power, and impunity. It’s raw, funny, unsettling, and unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of societal contradictions. Take, for example, Patrick David Shaw: a celebrated crime-fighter who devoted his life to taking down Nairobi’s most dangerous criminals. But he was also a colonial-era vigilante – ruthless, trigger-happy, known to conscript children into dangerous missions, and operate outside any formal justice system. The play allows both truths to coexist, demanding that we hold space for contradiction and interrogate the systems that created men like him.

For the opening scenes, characters time travel to the present to banter with the audience about Gen Z protests, the chaos that have ensued, and the play’s central theme – police brutality and extrajudicial killings. The cued music, of course, is Super Mazembe’s popular Kasongo. Justin Mirichii as Hamisi, a cop who’s surprisingly the moral centre of the story, borrows a voice all too familiar when he talks about police brutality: “It’s just a bullet. So long as it doesn’t hit a major organ, you’ll probably be safe.” The statement lands like salt on a fresh wound.

Mercy Mutisya as Kamene is a former cop turned angry, radical, gun-wielding revolutionary bar owner who wants to burn everything to the ground, maybe with the exception of Wambui’s Olivia, her ‘cousin’ – a subtle nod to queerness that’s so easy to miss but one that shows the ever bold and defiant spirit of Too Early for Birds.

Kiptoo Kirwa is Abdul, the cool-as-pond-water, selfish anti-revolutionary who puts his needs above everyone else. Tobit Tom as Oti lives to serve the highest bidder, believes in nothing, stands for nothing. William Mwangi’s Katana is the ever-charismatic bar attendant.

And there’s the mysterious file each character wants, for reasons of their own.

This is a three-hour show, with characters spending 90% of the time delivering history lectures and only 10% reenacting them. In lesser hands, it would be soporific. But when the curtains fall, it feels like mere minutes have passed. That’s the magnetism these six actors bring.

Now, this is a three-hour show where characters spend 90 percent of the time literally giving history lectures and 10 percent reenacting them. In the hands of any lesser performer, the audience would be asleep within 20 minutes, and yet when the curtains fall, it feels like I had only been sitting for a few minutes. That’s the magnetism these six actors bring to their characters.

When these actors speak, they dazzle with their frankness, their easy charm and their comedic timing. Their dynamic is so effortless, as if they have always existed as six people, not individuals. I especially couldn’t get over Mutisya’s Kamene. She turns bitterness into poetry.  Her timing is razor-sharp, cutting through the air, and yet her rage still finds room for aching vulnerability. Wambui’s delivery is wafting, careful, and soft. You see her thoughts, unspoken and flickering, play across her face. Their co-stars Mirichii, Kirwa, Tobit and Mwangi match this energy with finesse, levity and gravity.

I should mention, though, that it helps a lot that the cast had brilliant material to work with because Badassery’s writing is its crown – undertaken by a team of young creatives and history nerds: Keith Ang’ana, Hellen Masido, Richard Oyamo, and Wairimu Kagichu, with the assistance of Mutisya and Bryan Ngartia.

The writers are wizards of wits who turn simple phrases into magical rib-crackers. Dialogue and monologues are used not to merely advance a story, but as things of beauty in and out of themselves. The characters don’t just tell jokes, they tell useful information that ends with a funny finish. The exchanges are rich, layered, and delightful verbal sparring.

Badassery comes at a time when police brutality in Kenya is alarmingly high. Only days ago, a cop, unprovoked, fatally shot an unarmed civilian in broad daylight under the glare of cameras. Another young man, a father to a toddler, was abducted from his home and brutally murdered in police custody.

The play doesn’t claim to hold the secret to a magic wand that can save the country from itself. Instead, it reminds us that what’s happening now is not new. That police violence isn’t random or accidental, that this thing that now plagues us is a colonial relic planted decades ago. But that it doesn’t have to be this way.

To the police, Badassery says, “What we need is something to keep us rooted, something to remind us of our humanity.” It reminds the police that this is their country too, if it burns their homes burn, if kids die, their kids die, if women are defiled and murdered, their wives, mothers, and daughters are women too.

To the citizens, Badassery says: “You cannot save the country alone.” That we must come together to tear down the ancient walls built on violence and impunity.

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