Theatre Review: Wakio Mzenge Weaves a Spell in John Sibi-Okumu’s ‘Elements’

Like Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, John Sibi-Okumu’s one-woman play Elements refuses a neat, trimmed resolution. The ending is as abrupt as the beginning, leaving the audience with discomfort and the haunting line: “Now, I turn off the lights.” Like The Seagull, Elements is a tragicomic exploration of love, art, identity, belonging, loss, and the quiet devastation of fractured lives and broken dreams.

At its recent staging at Macmillan Memorial Library on Friday 15 August, my mind inadvertently wanders to Chekhov’s Nina Zarechnaya’s monologue: “for us, whether we write or we act, it’s not the honor and the glory of which I’ve dreamed that is important, no, it’s the spirit to endure,” when Wakio Mzenge’s Dana, her searing gaze cast upon the audience, asks: “How can I write about happiness if I have never been happy? How can I write about sadness if I have never been sad?”

Perhaps, Sibi-Okumu was inspired, in some parts, by the 1896 Russian play. Or perhaps I’m simply reaching, desperately trying to connect these two plays, which, as an artist myself, I find to be among the most honest exploration of an artistic life.

While little – in the traditional sense – happens in The Seagull, the same cannot be said of Elements. In just one hour, we journey through three continents, live in multiple countries, and speak in multiple accents. People meet, fall in love, marry, have children, and get divorced. People are born, grow, and die. And we watch Dana flailing, grasping desperately for any ounce of meaning, pining for any sense of control in an otherwise spiraling, traumatic life. Punching away at a world that never made any room for her. We watch her progressively lose touch with the lived reality, slowly descending, first into frantic chaos, then madness, then eventually, peace? Surrender? Or a final gust of agency? ‘Now, I turn off the lights,’ she says, and the stage fades to black.

Dana, a writer and an academic, is an everywoman. As a multiracial – born of an Indian-Kenyan father and Irish-Caribbean mother – she can pass as Indian, Ethiopian Jew, Somali, Black American, etc. Everything awful that can ever happen to a woman has either happened to her or around her: divorce – her parents’ and her own, female genital mutilation, racism, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, grief. 

Now, Sibi-Okumu’s decision to make Dana a universal representation of all female struggles, is the weakest link in the play. I find it stronger and more resonant when art, especially one centred around marginalised groups, tells specific stories rather than trying to represent the said group’s collective experiences.

To the writer’s credit, Elements avoids overt political statements and sociological didacticism. Therefore, despite the character being a universal representative of women’s struggle, the play doesn’t come off as inorganic, or disingenuous. Dana, as a character, is able to make a political or social point without sacrificing her personal traits and background because the messages and themes are breathed by the work, not told by it.

Originally written and staged in French in 2013, this revival sees Sibi-Okumu step aside as director for Stuart Nash of the Nairobi Performing Arts. True to his fondness for immersive theatre, Nash abandons the traditional stage-house divide, instead designing the entire space (including the audience sitting area) as a set.

So we find ourselves in a writer’s studio surrounded by extensive bookshelves. In front of us, there’s a study desk and a sofa. The set is deliberately designed to draw the audience into Dana’s psyche. We are in her web, where characters jump off her books and become alive. Where her intellectual sharpness collides with her emotional vulnerability, her relationships are haunted by power imbalance and betrayals, and her writing is her way of making sense of the chaos, as well as a space where she confronts her own complicity and contradictions. 

When Elements begins, Dana is at the pinnacle of her writing and academic career, having just been nominated for a prestigious award, yet emptier than ever, broken, devoid of meaning. She presents her turbulent life like a lecture, shifting between moments of inebriation and clarity, gravity and levity. She introduces us to who she thinks she is presently, which is a nihilistic intellectual who has lost any desire to find meaning in life, spending her time gulping alcohol. She gives us a quick run-through of her complicated, fragmented identity, her struggles with belonging.

Then she takes us to her beginnings, to how she became who she is. Her childhood in England, an abusive father, and her parents’ divorce. Then emigration to Kenya as a chirpy, wide-eyed ten-year-old. The culture shock, the abuse that marks her and alters her life forever. Her artistic and academic career. The books she publishes over the years – mining her personal life and the lives of those around her for inspiration. Her first marriage. Her second marriage. Then, as an afterthought, her two kids, son and daughter, from the first marriage. The daughter, seemingly distant, lives with her father. But the son, who is “what a mom calls a genius musician,” is revealed to be dead at the end.

The play unfolds as both a confession and a testimony, and Mzenge, taking on a character once embodied by the French thespian Nathalie Vairac, commands it with an iron grip. Elements is one of the most complex solo performances, and for this revival, Mzenge is in her element.

Few actors could play Dana with as much fluidity and a healthy balance of gravitas and charm. In such a tight, demanding play, you need quite the magnetism to hold an audience for an hour. And Mzenge isn’t one to cultivate attention; she seizes it the moment her expressive eyes sweep through the room with the quiet authority of an actor who sees the audience as a blank canvases to be coloured and defined. And she keeps us till the end.

Departing from her usual, larger-than-life vocal projection, Mzenge leans into subtlety. Her expressive facial expressions and restrained vocal tone create an intimacy as though she were speaking to an individual, not a crowd. Her nuanced physicality suspends disbelief. So we believe her when she says she’s a 10-year-old girl with a British accent eating ugali for the first time, or a middle-aged academic just chatting about her books.

Throughout, Mzenge is like a spider, holding us in her powerful web. And when she says, ‘now, I turn off the lights’, and coils on the couch, it takes a moment to free ourselves of her spell, regain our senses, and fully grasp the profound exploration of the human condition we’ve just witnessed.

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