A surprisingly frank take on social and economic tensions in Kenya that puts women at the centre of an ever-evolving power balance.
Sally Woodcock's Fanta Orange brings together a mix of three distinct characters who feed off each other's flaws in the Kenyan countryside. Her script is so bold and believable that she manages to make their co-dependency simultaneously spoken and taken for granted.
We're introduced to Roger, a white Kenyan farmer with a severe lack of foresight. He's happy to find stunning, blonde, British Ronnie in a bar, happier still to find she's slightly mad. Ronnie is fascinated by dirt-eaters and obsessed with righting the wrongs of the soft drinks industry by providing fresh milk to Africa's children. She soon finds herself pregnant with Roger's child at the same time as his dutiful black housemaid Regina.
As well as the complicated power balance informed by history and contemporary ideals, Woodcock uses the prospect of the two children arriving at the same time to talk about tensions in terms of colour, which might seem obvious, but is rarely done so well. So while Ronnie is abhorred at Roger calling a black man a baboon, she is still disappointed that an orphan she wants to adopt is “jet-black” not “brownish-black”. Through her, Woodcock introduces the different connotations of seeing a wealthy white woman with a black child, and a poor black woman with a white child.
As the play charts the unfolding relationships, the politics on the farm and the progression of the women's pregnancies, Regina takes her place in the spotlight and concludes key scenes with her own frank analysis. This risky technique works brilliantly and gives Regina a voice. It puts the narrative in her hands, and allows her to impose her own intelligence onto a story that might otherwise have victimised her.
Gareth Machin's flawless direction ensures these monologues are snappy and sees Regina sit patiently in the aisles alongside the audience watching Regina and Ronnie talk about her; all against Alex Marker's remarkable sweeping set design. It's simple but detailed and manages to fit in a bedroom and a spacious veranda against a backdrop of Kenya's lush hills, as Neill Brinkworth's perfect lighting takes us seamlessly from bright mornings to tense nights.
What stops this being a five-star play is its eagerness to spell things out for the audience. Particularly in the final scenes, where Ronnie, alone in her car, is permitted to voice her catharsis. Her back and forth is believable as she reasserts her purpose to herself, but by this point we've joined the dots for ourselves.
Nonetheless, Woodcock has turned her play into more than a microcosm of racial and sexual tensions in Africa and creates a prism through which to view the multiple complexities that come with a combination of changing power balances, emotional baggage and inescapable conscience.
Fanta Orange runs at Finborough Theatre until 26th November.
Image by Robert Davenport
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