Mr Mburu is a 40-year-old man, distraught by problems in his marriage with 18-year-old Belinda.

Straitlaced, unemotional and conventional, he does not understand the whimsical, sentimental and emotional ways of his wife.

The first bloom of marriage having have faded, each now sees the other for what they really are. It does not occur to either that the reason for the problems in their marriage is that they are the diametrical opposites of each other.

What gives Belinda joy and reason to live are the exact things that make Mr Mburu cringe and try to change her to be more like him.

For anyone that has ever tried it, this type of Pygmalion project is always doomed to fail. Belinda is aware of her husband’s occasional trips to the city brothel but is not concerned by them, arguing that a man should venture out and get more variety than his wife can give him.

While Mr Mburu believes that marriage is a state of law that should be adhered to, for her, marriage is a state of mind that only lasts as long as one wishes.

Christopher Row, a private detective Mr Mburu has hired to investigate if Belinda’s recent coldness and distance have been caused by her having an affair, becomes the unlikely mediator between the two.

If the human population could be divided into two — cold, logical, rational thinkers and warm, fuzzy emotional feelers, Mr Mburu is the former and Belinda the latter. It transpires that the detective is closer in temperament to Belinda with his dishevelled, outrageous, inappropriate ways and he takes her side when their disagreement reaches a crescendo.

All the complaints that Mr Mburu makes of Belinda, the detective loves; all the whimsy’s she indulges in, he shares too. Joe Kinyua, playing the detective, does a stellar job. He holds his own in playing the buffoonish character of the detective, causing a lot of laughs.

Eating his njugu karanga out of a plastic bag, walking in a bizarre shuffle and wearing white rubber shoes, he is the epitome of goofy.

Unaware that his attempt to recreate her in his own image is the cause of their rift, Mr Mburu does not also see that it was the difference between him and Belinda that attracted him to her at first.

“I felt renewed, I felt young again,” he tells the detective of the thing that had drawn him to Belinda. He’s all about order, “her place,” insisting that she lives by a code of rules he has set. Everything about him is disciplined, orderly and accurate.
In the scene in which Belinda comes in, we find that she has started to rebel at the constrictive routine her husband has set her; she is determined to become her own woman. She has refused to go to cooking school because she’s tired of it.

If Mr Mburu’s highest ideal of a person as he tells her, is that they be an intellectual, her highest ideal is to be a free spirit, an artist.

It says a lot that even the artistic career she has dreamed of has been stamped into the dust by her husband. At this stage of their marriage, she is tired of trying to be an intellectual and must be true to herself as a feeler. This is not to say that feelers cannot be intellectuals however.

In the middle of the investigation, which involves Christopher Row following Belinda around, she falls in love with him, despite that fact that in all their encounters, they never exchange a word.

He ends up disappointing her when he tells her his story, revealing that he is off married women and is not the type that would want to have his own young girl by his side. As he offers to wipe her tears with his soiled handkerchief, he ends up throwing all his “njugu karanga” on her by accident.

Twice My Age is a powerful exposition of the marriage of opposites. The convention and the wild, tradition and the new, the solid and the scattered, the old and the young, the bound and the free.

Somehow, it takes the irreverent detective to work his magic to see if he can bring the couple together, going over and beyond the call of duty.

He, however, ends up getting his own back as he manages to coerce Mr Mburu into letting him to join his firm as an informal partner and we are left to imagine the havoc he will wreak in Mr Mburu’s absence.

Fred Murithi plays Mr Mburu and Mwajuma Bahati his young wife Belinda. This is a play to catch and muse on how we manage (or do not) the opposites in our own lives, whether it is in work, love, family or lifestyles.

Carl Jung once remarked that the opposites we have not managed to integrate are our shadows, and if we remain unaware of them, they will continually come out from behind to bite us without warning. Life has its ways of bringing them into our lives — through marriage for instance — so that we can integrate them for growth.

Directed by Ellis Otieno, Twice My Age runs at Phoenix Players from January 15-31.