It has been a varied repertoire at Phoenix Theatre in the month of January with the fun and frolics of the comic opera Pirates of Nairobi Dam, sunshine and laughter in the comedy Shirely Valentine and the grim side of life in the drama Respect.

On January Friday 13, I watched Shirley Valentine (1986), a play by Willy Russell, a one-character play in three acts about a middle-aged woman, Mrs Shirley Bradshaw (played by June Gachui) who has reached that point in her life where she looks back and wonders what happened to Shirley Valentine, the girl she was before she became Mrs Bradshaw. A trip to Greece allows her to rediscover herself and the end of the play hints at the possibility that she may take this journey of discovery with her husband.

The play is a light take on the mid-life crisis in women, focusing on a woman’s role in marriage in contrast with her own desires, very much like Dario Fo’s A Woman Alone, which was written five years later.

Gachui appositely depicts your run-of-the-mill, modern, British housewife whose accent however, leans more to BBC English than Liverpool working class. She nonetheless manages to draw the audience into the world of Shirley Valentine, revealing a blunt reality that most people must have recognised, the end of the play, she received a standing ovation.

Shirley’s drab life has reduced her to speaking to the wall and her repeated reference to this wall invokes the vision of “the fourth wall”— the imaginary separation between the audience and the performance, which is the main emphasis of realism in theatre. The director, Millicent Ogutu pushes this realism to its end in act I, where Shirley peels potatoes, washes them under running water, cooks real chips and fries a real egg on a real gas cooker in a properly fitted kitchen.

Ogutu chose to keep this play in the original setting of Liverpool while as it would have sat so easily in Nairobi, just as it would easily fit in Kampala or Dar es Salaam or Mumbai. The average 40-something woman anywhere in the world would certainly identify with Shirley Bradshaw’s quest for Shirley Valentine.

On January 20, I went to the opening of Respect (2005) by the German playwright Lutz Hubner, also directed by Millicent Ogutu.
The play is set in the office of a psychologist, Korbert (Samson Psenjen) who has been charged with assessing the mental health of Cem (Martin Githinji) and Sinan (Jack Gitonga) and their subsequent eligibility to be tried in court for the murder of Elena (Njoki Kagwanja).

In this play, Ogutu shows she can do as much with theatricalism as she can with realism. She uses space in such a way that the current action takes place against an orange background and flashbacks take place against a blue background.

The action is choreographed in some flashback allowing the audience to imagine scenes, on the highway and in the streets of Cologne, Germany (in this case Naivasha) and eventually she blurs the demarcation between the past and current action.

The characters, like Shirley Valentine, are deeply psychological but unlike Shirley Valentine, who portrays normal, everyday life and dilemmas, the characters in Respect, especially those of Cem and Ellena, show the dark side of the human psyche. They reflect, disturbingly, a young generation with distorted views of their identity and sexuality.