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Moses Serugo
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Written by Moses Serugo
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Monday, 01 June 2009 07:20 |
Like most performing arts critics, I found Obsessions’ latest theatrical offering To Love is To Die cheesy. I think I have had enough of storylines about palace intrigue and my take is that playwright Ronnie Mulindwa ought to experiment with something more contemporary. That plot about a king whose queen cheats on him with the Prime Minister who in turn has a liking for the princess was a hard sell. The consensus among my peers was that with yet another cliché-ridden script and recycled one-liners from previous stage productions, Mulindwa’s creative genius was on the wane.
Repeat patrons must also have wondered at the play’s mutations. Initially, the play had a contrived Romeo and Juliet ending in which a gun-totting session leaves the entire palace hierarchy annihilated. As the weeks went by, it was only the cheating queen and the spineless king that die, leaving the princess and Prime Minister as the kingdom’s succession glimmer of hope.
The bulk of the plot was a shouting match between the queen and the princess. It was tiring at times watching these two get at each other’s throats. It was a welcome distraction that the feuding queen (Sharon Salmon) and princess (Natasha Sinayobye) wore skimpy outfits most of the time. This smouldering duo made for great optical nutrition but then again, you can only raise a theatre patron’s testosterone levels only too high.
The production had a bigger saving grace. There were two palace maids played by Jackie Tumusiime and Alice Nalweyiso who provided much needed comic relief in their pursuit of Akiram, the disinterested palace eunuch. These two quarrelled, gossiped, eavesdropped and elicited the most rib-crackers probably because most of their lines were in Luganda, unlike other characters that depended on innuendo to draw laughter from their English language dialogue.
The thing though about Mulindwa is that criticism of his “fairytale” plots has been like water off a duck’s back. Patrons came in droves after all, although that was mostly because of the clever Easter season timing. Some arts critics are however sounding the knell and God forbid that To Love is To Die should be the omen for the group’s eventual demise. Obsessions is one of Uganda’s most recognisable entertainment brands and has, like the legendary Phoenix, risen from the ashes of member departures. It may be a little premature to book cemetery space for the group.
It may help though for Mulindwa to retrace the group’s urban dance roots that introduced them as an entertainment tour de force in 1999. The three dances in To Love is To Die were the other salient highlight.
The imaginative choreography had many a patron moving in their seats. A dance workshop for anyone interested in getting in on the stage action would have endeared the group to its fans. Otherwise Mulindwa may want to think about re-inventing the group yet again by trying his hand at doing the soap Obsessions had set out to do at its inception in 1999.
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