RE-ENACTING GENDER WARS ON STAGE

ARTS & REVIEW

The classic ‘gender war’ play by Ola Rotimi is back on stage. Though abridged, it still seethes with the heated gender debate, a drive for mutual understanding and its promised celebration of mutual name-calling, says Yinka Olatunbosun

Whatever is happening on that stage is a lot better than a fistfight. Indeed, the play, Man Talk Woman Talk, has always been a high-octane drama featuring the sassy, yet cerebral, Karina (Girl) and the quick-witted Michael (Boy). A one-act play, it should be a director’s delight because of its simple setting.

With just one scene, this drama – swirling around a plot built on long arguments – often requires a minimalist stage design. It should surprise no theatre buff, therefore, that the theatre director, Joshua Alabi is able to maximise the small arena inside The Kininso Place at Oregun, Lagos in his bid to usher in the birth of community theatre in the heart of Ikeja.

Talking about the plot, it is also simple and is woven around a university community debate that mimics a civil court. A triangular table, stacked with books, forms the performance area. But in Alabi’s interpretation of the play, he remixes the courtroom template from the playwright by dressing the judge up in wear traditional costume as opposed to the regular wig and gown. The character of Karina is not particularly hyper-sexualised although she dons a see-through black top and a mini-leather skirt with pantyhose. Her argument draws attention to her cerebral acumen more than her physical appearance. On the flip side, Michael seems somewhat uptight with his crisp white shirt tucked into his black pant held upright by suspenders. As a law student, he freely references existing judgements to support his provocative arguments against the womenfolk. This is to the delight of the judge, who is desperate to see a man win the age-long battle of the sexes.

Back to Karina, she is bent on recalibrating the way men perceive women. With well-articulated lines, laced with insults, she carries on the argument to prove that men are playboys. Seeing that the judge is biased, taking sides with Michael, the counsellor backs Karina up with moral support and eventually both parties try to involve the audience in the argument. That, of course, is the beauty of a stage play: the direct interaction between the cast and the audience in spite of the fourth wall. In order to make the play just one-hour long, some interesting lines are trimmed off from the original script by the director. But the actors make it interesting with their own interpretation of the roles vis-à-vis mannerisms and interjection of a few remarks in Pidgin or Yoruba.

The play is once again reinforced as a posthumous quintessential comedy from Ola Rotimi, which attempts to reconcile the biases against men and women to affect mutual co-existence of the two.

For Alabi, the plan is to keep this play running throughout the month of February. According to him, the response from school-age children to this drama has been overwhelming. “This time because we are just starting the theatre series here in Oregun, it is a small space. We want to start small. We don’t have funding for what we are doing yet. And it cost us a lot of money. In Oregun, they really don’t know what theatre is. Our neighbours – when we are singing or having night gigs – would come. But when it is theatre, you won’t see them. We have decided that for the next four months, we will have plays that are not more than three or four cast so that we can pay an encouraging amount to the actors and not involve too much technicalities.

“We don’t think we have exhausted ‘Man Talk, Woman Talk’ yet. We had a school run as part of our festival and a lot of school children saw it. We didn’t think that they would understand it because it is verbose and it has heavy language. But they enjoyed it thoroughly. We thought if secondary students could enjoy this in in open space within their school compound, then we should push more towards getting more adult audience to see it. For February, it is still going to be Man Talk Woman Talk.”

Joy Imezi who played the role of Counsellor in the play admitted that the play is still relevant to the contemporary society, especially in the way women are perceived as objects of sexual-gratification. “I see the role as one of those women who has been so long in the law firm; one of those secretaries that are so efficient, very reliable,” she said. “They always want to do their jobs. I think she is also one of those women that support women. I feel that is why she is very supportive of the girl and her opinions.

“The play is still very relevant till today because if you look at the issues concerning how women dress, and how men see women which is not entirely their fault. Most times, most men want the women to look a certain way and some girls focus on building themselves up physically to fit that standard. This is always going to be a debate of the sexes.”

Also, the stereotypical way of measuring one’s intellectual strength by her chosen field of study is one of the issues that the play seeks to resolve. Karina, a theatre student, makes very valid counter-arguments against Michael’s position on the gender matter before the judge. Even Michael has to ask what her discipline is. The playwright’s point is that a full knowledge of the law is not a prerequisite for a rational mind to think clearly about issues of our collective humanity. Another theme raised in the play is gender superiority.

The inconclusive end to the arguments by both sexes in Man Talk Woman Talk alludes to the infinite nature of arguments on the gender divide.