A Feisty Horde

Joke Silva in ‘For Coloured Girls’ by Wole Oguntokun

Girl-powered angst was apparent as the play ‘For Coloured Girls’ made its first landing on Nigerian shores courtesy Flytime Entertainment. Adewole Ajao was at the premiere which held at the MUSON Centre in Lagos

The name of the play was a mouthful, but as the adaptation of the drama ‘For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf’ opened on December 30 at the Shell Hall of the MUSON Centre, the apparent angst that was exuded by the all-star cast rekindled memories of ‘V Monologues’.

Add some of the anti-male energy in Ola Rotimi’s ‘Man Talk, Woman Talk’ and you get some inkling of what the 1975 production by Ntozake Shange’s was all about.

Before its two-day performance in Lagos, Shange’s drama had also been adapted for TV and shortened to ‘For Coloured Girls’ by US producer Tyler Perry. While Perry retained the nine-woman cast of the original, the Nigerian version by Wole Oguntokun stuck to seven ladies on a packed night.

Oguntokun’s knack for indigenous adaptations was again evident on the evening. This predilection had spawned a handful of variations of existing plays, and it all seemed so familiar as Joke Silva, Tiwa Savage, Jumoke Bello, Iretiola Doyle, Marcy Dolapo Oni and Reanne Opia took centre stage at the Shell Hall in the top-notch venue to rekindle the landmark piece on black feminism.

The cast of For Coloured Girls’ by Wole Oguntokun 

Each member of the cast was from a different part of the country, and instead of colours being the tag for each character, their real names were adopted. These, and the use of music from indigenous artistes like TuFace and Daddy Showkey, brought more reality to the production, making the play as indigenous as the costumes donned by the women with interconnected lives. 

The boogie of the seven characters in the opening scenes would not earn top marks in a dancing competition, but their stage presence got top points in an evening dripping with female bravado, and sparks of stubborn insistence on their views.

Drums and dim lights set the grim complexion of the play’s initial scenes, with the women venting their spleen. It was a pungent appetiser for a prurient scene where Tiwa Savage dwelled extensively on her first sexual encounter in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle after a booze-filled matriculation night.

“I was the only virgin in the crowd…that night, the whole of Lagos matriculated.” Giving it up in such a vehicle is seen as a sin by some of her sisters on stage, but there seems to be no injustice in getting some. The only crime is in being a man, a view made apparent in the ensuing dialogues that portray male specie as brash, inane and infantile.

Invectives from the women run in sync with a glut of expletives that the audience laps up with relish. Any hopes for pristine diction is vanquished once such words banish all civility to the background.

A scene from the drama

As the play glides through a catalogue of ambivalent issues that have caught the daughters of Eve in its unforgiving web, there is also space for rape. Portrayed as something beyond the physical, the term spawns latent-rape bravado referred to as a male style of mingling with the opposite sex.

“We invite them to our homes and they rape us by invitation,” says a member of the cast during a monologue.
Amidst the absurdity of this conclusion, her faulty portrayal of the opposite sex chimes with that of Matilda Obaseki’s, who paints males as suave scoundrels that specialise in hit and run relationships. Clad in ripped jeans, her initial racket over a painful physical loss becomes understandable, when she cries “Gimme my stuff back. Stealing it does not make it yours,” she urges.

Fortunately the report is not all scathing for men. Wole Soyinka is a point of reverence for Ireti Doyle whose infatuation with the writer makes him the beginning of her reality. “… A black man who refused to blend, Kongi was my secret lover from the age of 12.”

Like most fantasies, her school girl fantasy is short-lived when she meets a street urchin with the same name as her archetypal man. This is one eye-opener preceding several in the play. Hard lessons and confessions also run in tandem.

“I used to live with the world, then I moved to Lagos Island. Now my universe is 70 kilometres… I can’t be nice to anyone. Nice is just a rip-off,” adds another voice from the cast.

The deluge of exposés in the play should be a form of escape for the ladies, but instead of lightening their emotional baggage, the hard lessons spurred from the ironic dissections draw them further into a vortex of inadequacies. A typical example is Jumoke Bello, a symbol of the uncertainty that finds life in every heart.

Her personal lament is a sorrow-laden interlude that actually blows a hole in the gale of anti-male sentiments belying the initial scenes. Grief also spurs from an unnecessary inner battle. “I’d convinced myself to believe that coloured girls had no right to romance. I could not stand being sorry and coloured at the same time.”

Her overview triggers another switch in a play that is already rife with fluctuating moods. By now it is trickling down to a general desire for fairytale endings as the ladies surrender to their softer emotions, and longings for proximity with the opposite sex. “All I have are big thoughts, small breasts and lots of love. I want to love you just as I am,” says Tiwa Savage.

Such sweet surrender offers a momentary soft landing. Behind it lurks the usual rude awakening, and it rears its ugly head again in another Tiwa Savage delivery.  She is infected with HIV after her hubby’s homosexuality lands her in soup. An awareness of this bitter pill ends the relationship and returns the play to the gloom of the opening scenes. 

It reaches its apogee in Joke Silva’s tearful story of how a father murders his kids. This juxtaposing of sorrow and suspense banishes any hopes of a blissful denouement. God is the only sanctuary, and the only sane escape is in finding him, or her as the cast put it in a statement they individually utter. “I found God in myself and I loved her,” they chorus.

Each of the stories is different, but there is a weird synergy of their lives via the cycle of poetic monologues that offer a near-exhaustive diary of the female scenario. The stage unity of the all-star ensemble was above-average. With accomplished names on the night, anything less would have been an oddity.

Add this to their success in delivering on the throes of womanhood, and the only production pall was the brevity of performance days at the MUSON Centre.