After watching Free Me, I remember telling a friend, who was seeing it a day later, that they were in for a treat. It felt odd to say that about a play centred on domestic abuse and drawn from a real-life story. Still, it was both moving and unexpectedly humorous.
This past weekend, Free Me struck straight at the hearts of its audience. It took us on a rollercoaster of joy, pain, anger, surprise, and disgust, and at times, several emotions all at once.
The play is based on the true story of award-winning theatre producer Gathoni Kimuyu and was staged at the Jain Bhavan auditorium in Loresho. The 800-seater venue was filled on opening night, Friday, November 28. The production follows Kimuyu’s life through five characters, each representing a different stage of her journey.
We are introduced to her early life through a 16-year-old Gathoni 1, played by Renee Gichuki. We see her in her Kangemi home, which, fittingly, is close to the auditorium. She carries the heavy burden of running the household and providing for her family at a very young age. This marks her first encounter with abuse.
At a club, she experiences her second, in the form of sexual harassment. Then one night, after visiting a male friend, she returns home to find her father waiting, he shoves a glass into her face. It is her third brush with violence.
Gathoni 2, played by Joan Langat, embodies her university years and, among all the Gathonis, has the least turbulent life. As she leaves the stage, Gathoni 3, portrayed by Ellah Maina, enters. Gathoni 3 endures the full weight of domestic abuse at the hands of Prince, played by Tobit Tom.
She meets Prince at her parents’ wedding celebration, and in a brilliant scene transition, the two move from dancing at the party to walking down the aisle, the veil now covering her face.
During the ceremony, she reflects on Prince’s troubling behaviour and asks the audience, humorously yet painfully, whether each moment should have been a green or red flag.
It’s one of the play’s sharpest blends of humour, audience participation, and harsh truth. Later, when Gathoni 3 meets her best friend, who has hired her to plan a party, Prince calls mid-conversation and demands she return home, afraid she might be “influenced” to leave him.
Prince, ironically named, wears black attire and a mask. In a later interview, Kimuyu explained that the mask symbolised darkness and was meant to turn him into a shadow, ensuring the audience despised the character rather than the actor.
When he unleashes violence on Gathoni 3, Gathoni 4 (played by Nungari Kiore), and Gathoni 5 (played by Gathoni Mutua), the brutality is amplified by harsh, strobe-like flashes of light by lighting technician Charles Wairimu. In one scene, Prince inflicts violence on all five versions of Gathoni. After each attack, he walks off with his head held high, proud and emboldened by his actions.
Whenever he stepped on stage, he embodied menace so completely that his presence was unsettling. The tension was heightened by heart-pounding music crafted by sound designer Mbugua Mbogua Mbugua. At one point, the audience collectively stiffened, unsure of what he would do next as he approached and sat near Gathoni’s character.
Scripted by Mercy Mutisya, Saumu Kombo, Magunga Williams, and Mugambi Nthiga, Free Me is blunt and provocative. In one moment, Gathoni 1 addresses the audience with “Ladies and disappointments…”, a twist on “Ladies and gentlemen” that calls out men who fail women.
In a poetic sequence, all five Gathonis share the stage, speaking about the statistics of gender-based violence and femicide while confronting the societal failures that allow them to persist. They also challenge the idea that a woman’s humanity must be validated through her relationship to a man, rejecting phrases like “What if she is your mother, daughter, or sister?” as insufficient responses to GBV.
Before the show began, director Mugambi Nthiga described the play as theatre activism. A somatic experiencing practitioner guided the audience on grounding techniques to prepare them for potentially triggering scenes.
The production wasn’t entirely bleak; it highlighted Kimuyu’s career as a scriptwriter on the TV series Machachari and even incorporated the show’s theme song, which the delighted audience sang along to. The scriptwriters were careful not to linger too long in any one chapter of her life, they gave just enough.
The transitions between the five women were powerful, and at times one would advise the next on how to avoid abuse, capturing the victim-blaming survivors often face. The characters also comforted one another, especially when one of them was enduring violence.
When Gathoni 5 finally stood up to Prince, the audience erupted in applause. As the play ended, it received a near-full standing ovation during the curtain call in the packed auditorium.
Photos: Courtesy