0
0
By Rafael Monomono, Theatre reviewer-at-large, Bookartville.com
Photos by Toyin Akinosho
In the end, the good man returns with forgiveness; the woman pushes her demons away; the stage lights go out and the audience roars with applause.
Is that the closure to the series of heartbreaks?
“Yes”, the audience returns, emphatically.
But the producer warns that things are not quite settled.
“You know women”, Bolanle Austen-Peters explains, “she might go back to them again”.
The 400 seat hall was packed full for every one of the 22 performances over 11 days beginning Boxing Day (December 26, 2024) and ending January 5, 2025, the first Sunday of the New Year.
I’d bought a 70,000Naira VVIP ticket-with a bit of a struggle- in the hope of securing a wide elbow room, like a first class seat in an airplane. It’s more than double the 30,000Naira ticket for what is described as the VIP seat. But other than the clearer line of sight to the stage, and some popcorn and a few morsels of small chops, there wasn’t much of an advantage.
With Dear Kaffy, the Bolanle Austen- Peters (BAP) Productions, TeraKulture’s in-house theatre outfit, had chosen a light hearted theme: the dating scene in Lagos, to help its audience ease out of what had been such a challenging year, Ms. Austen Peters said. It’s the 13th consecutive year the company has produced an end of the year drama.
The lightness of Dear Kaffy is a marked contrast with the anger in Motherland, a story of Nigeria’s unrelenting willingness to beat itself down, produced and presented by the playhouse in December 2022. Full of youthful yearnings for change, it was, Austen- Peters said at the time, “my own contribution to the lingering debate on our political future”. In what has become her standard speech at the end of every production at the venue, Ms. Austen Peters admonished her audience, two months to the 2023 Presidential election: “I’ve done my part, now please go and vote your conscience, wisely”.
The archetype of Dear Kaffy is well-known from the dating log books. In this telling, Kikelomo Olota is the smartest of the Olota sisters, coming top of her class in every subject. But it isn’t enough for her that she beats everyone at school work; she also wants to be well liked; so she begins to put as much effort in partying hard and hunting men.
Kikelomo’s case turns out to exemplify the syndrome of a good girl running after Bad boys, justifying the (clinical sexologist) Sarah Melancon’s postulation that “a ‘good girl’ may admire the bad boy’s sense of freedom. Despite the fact that this quality makes him an unsuitable partner for the long-term, it can make him so attractive, it’s seemingly worth the potential pain associated.”
For all the advantage-taken of her by “low lifes” like Tamuno, Kikelomo repeatedly spurns offers from Dad and sister to try a “decent” guy they are willing to introduce to her. Without coming even close to a conversation, she dismisses Kunle as square and boring after their first two meetings. And days after Kunle and her hit it off on a romantic date in a garden, Tamuno saunters back into her life and Okafor’s Law kicks in: she gives in to his sexual advances for the umpteenth time.
Dear Kaffy dispenses with strict code of chronological sequence and simply chooses to be comedic; It is more a set of skits strung together to make a story designed for laughs. The only character that is fleshed out in some way is Kikelomo. And to go by the audience’s response, it works. While there is nothing to indicate the passage of time, from high school to full womanhood, we are expected to assume that Kikelomo passed out well in college despite the brief scene in which her father barges into her room in anger and berates her for lower grades. For the better part of the play, she is in her thirties, supposedly with a good job, and she is the one financing the gym business of Tamuno, the lover she has in what is her 35th year.
Like several of BAPP’s feel-good productions, (eg, Waka, Saro) the dialogue is aerated with fitting lyrics from the Afrobeats discography that the audience spontaneously sings along with. There’s detailed attention to costuming and props and this is the one stage in Lagos, Nigeria, that is well equipped with multimedia effects.
The highs of the drama are designed to be the arguments in which the men in Kikelomo’s life make it explicit that they are dumping her. It’s always a tear jerker scene.
So who played what role? The most identifiable actor in Dear Kaffy is Bimbo Manuel, a vastly experienced player who first performed on the country’s big stage-the National Theatre-39 years ago as a Police Superintendent in Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead. He is a BAPP regular and the closest to being a resident artiste in the BAPP repertory theatre, if there was one. A natural thespian, Manuel, who can appear casual about his work and doesn’t stretch things, delivers this particular job with effortless ease, but his assignment is nowhere as tough as that of Uzo Osimkpa, who is consistently compelling as Kikelomo.
No theatre producer in Lagos, Nigeria, it seems, provides anymore a published, or advertised or online display of, or website-posted, names of actors who play what character, in their plays. In BAPP‘s case, a would-be reviewer has to be attentive to the actors introducing themselves at the end of the play. It’s not always audible and I find it a little demeaning of the stars. In these days of digital menus at restaurants, producers can also do what galleries do: let your audience snap a code and see the lineup of cast and crew.
Outside of the TeraKutture Arena on the night of Sunday January 5, 2025, after the last performance of Dear Kaffy, you require a lot of patience to navigate the heavy traffic inflicted on one of the worst maintained roads in Victoria Island by the throng that has come to see the last show. Once off the sore Tiamiyyu Savage road, it is evident, from the light traffic all over Victoria Island, that the 2024/2025 Detty December has ended.
Kikelomo has summoned the courage to say to her inner and outer demons: ‘Get thee off me, Satan’. With that scream: “Leave Me!!!!”, the Detty December party is adjourned till December 2025.
