Play puts spotlight on Kenya’s crisis of gender-based violence

The play was restaged this month at the Chandaria Jain Social Group auditorium in Nairobi. Photograph: Esther Sweeney/The Guardian

There are audible gasps in the auditorium in Nairobi as a husband launches a volley of blows and slaps on his wife and pushes her to the floor. “I wish I could spare you this,” the wife tells the audience. “My husband beat me up as if we were in a bar fight. Except, in a bar someone fights back.”

The scene comes from Free Me, an autobiographical play by Gathoni Kimuyu, a Kenyan theatre and TV producer who lived through an abusive marriage.