When Abuja saw ‘The Sisters’

With a theme that unravelled the vanity and deceit that characterises the lives of the high society and also stresses the transiency of political power and status, the four-man cast told a powerful story which left the audience glued to their seats and nodding in agreement with the realities of present day issues.   The […]

With a theme that unravelled the vanity and deceit that characterises the lives of the high society and also stresses the transiency of political power and status, the four-man cast told a powerful story which left the audience glued to their seats and nodding in agreement with the realities of present day issues.  

The play opened with the mourning of the President who had just passed due to a variety of causes from heart attack to fatigue to being suffocated in his sleep and many more as reported by rumours and the media. Taiwo the crippled of the sisters was the voice of conscience speaking up fearlessly as the social critic condemning her late brother-in law whom she described as a dictator and inhuman.

With her strong will and rebellious spirit, she defiled the norms of what mourning a relative should be smoking, consuming alcohol and wearing the colour red as against black. In her opinion and from the memorabilia stuck on her dress, it was more worthy to remember puppy’s day which celebrated the lives of fallen heroes than mourning a man who didn’t know what compassion for family meant.

As the play progressed in between calming Taiwo’s razor blade tongue and contending with the timidity of sister Toun, there was an unravelling of long torturous movements of shocking revelations which demonstrated the flawlessness of humanity and how very little we know even of those under the same roof.

As is the reality of many families at burial time, Funmi the President’s childless widow learned of five children her ‘saintly’ husband as Taiwo tagged him, had had during the marriage. Just as she found this out, the sisters also discovered that their beloved father had behaved in like manner; fathering another daughter before his wife was able to conceive and bear him children.

Analysing the characters one would see the different parts of society replicated in the roles they played. Taiwo the outspoken one damning the consequences of her outspokenness and intolerance of the president whom she claimed killed her husband, is torn between extending this hatred to her sister and being family and support to her in the same circumstances she had to go through with losing a loved one.

Toun, now married to Jesus after a failed marriage which was doomed from day one, the gentle and sometimes indecisive one trying to hard in someone else’s shadow but finally speaks up when push comes to shove.

Funmi living in oblivion of the realities of life outside her office as first lady and is reluctant to evacuate the official residence to the awaiting president after four terms in office. This couldn’t be more explicit as regards the realities that stare at us boldly.

 Nana the ever obedient and submissive one to the whining and calls of her mistress Funmi, is somewhat the all knowing one. She has doses of information which the others have no clue about until the end. The realisation that all along she has been their sister and the one they have all called bastard and all sorts of names is too much for them to come to terms with after they read their father’s will instructing them to share his assets in equal proportions with her.

On discovering that Nana who had served all three of them as a maid literarily was in fact their elder sister, the play came to an end in an exceptionally dramatic mode as all three sisters chorused  “you?”