December 10, 2022 – It was a feminine day at the Abuja Fringe Festival, when the three play productions Waiting For Her, Bridezella and Esther’s Revenge staged at the festival were coincidentally women-centered.
Produced by three different artistic groups, the plays addressed themes of mental health, sexual and gender-based violence, grief and misguided love/lack of self-love. From the plays, mental health was approached from different perspectives – first, as arising from unaddressed grief as in Arojah Royal Theatre’s adaptation of Eli Sophie’s Waiting For Her – which interestingly worked as a carthasis for the young playwright in dealing with a personal grief, hence denoting the importance of grieving to avoid the unhealthy eruptions arising from bottled emotion as displayed by the character Olufunke in Bridezella, whose fiancé cheated on with her girlfriend; or worse yet, like Esther in Esther’s Revenge whose emotional eruption after a long period of suppressed emotional, sexual and gender-based violence in her relationship with a pimp and serial cheater partner, ended in her stabbing him to death 37 times, as a matter of self-defense.
One other non-conspicuous theme running through these plays are the women’s lack of self-love or what some would call standards of how they should or should not be treated by anybody – man or woman. This is crucial, as without setting the standards a man must meet in one’s life or setting a low standard – women unwittingly accept being mistreated by men, as seen in Esther’s Revenge and in Bridezella. Esther accepted physical abuse as normal in a relationship, which made her boyfriend bolder, to the extent of pimping her off to other men; while Olufunke – didn’t draw the line as to what role she should play as a woman in her relationship that would neither pass her off as a moneybag to her fiancé nor encourage his jobless for the full five years of their relationship. Of course, without drawing boundaries for her best friend Vanessa, Elina not only finds her best friend violating the ‘girlfriends code’ of not sleeping with your friend’s ex hours after their breakup, but also having to be Vanessa’s shadow such that she experienced existential crisis at the death of her friend.
Although predictable, the characterization of the three female protagonists are complicated and fleshed out, a testament of the writers’ grasp of people and life – the heavy smoking, belly and cleavage exposing Esther who is not a prostitute; the rich, confident but desperate to be married Olufunke; and the feminist but mousy Elina overshadowed by her friend.
With the exception of Waiting For Her, the Mambaah Café proved a relatively good space for staging the productions. Staging the Bridezella in the sitting areas of the café courtyard, allowed the actress weave in and around the audience (which also includes the café’s other patrons) during performance, thus enabling an interaction with the audience that not only broke the fourth wall, but had the audience actively participate in the story, via improvised questions and responses between the performer and the audience that furthered a little bit (if not consequentially) the story. Meantime, the café’s blocks of space that can hold parties of six to seven people each, served as a testimony room and cell blocks for the Kenneth Uphopho’s directed play Esther’s Revenge.
In all, the coincidental turn of the evening, resulting in the celebration of womanhood, is a good sign of how theatre and the arts can address/highlight relevant societal issues of our time, and to do so in a manner that is human, and allows for the grey’s areas and complication that is life; and how empathy can enable an audience – to seek justice knowing where the shoes pinch on the other feet. As the audience jury in Esther’s Revenge pronounced – “No amount of ill plight can make taking a life go unpunished,” by the end of the play, a more empathic audience ruled – “Involuntary manslaughter, to be mentally rehabilitated,” “Discharged, acquitted and sent for rehabilitation.”
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