Onto virgins, babies are delivered.
Debby Whyte who plays the lead, Olamide, anchors this straight-forward comedy about a young woman kicking up a storm over a pregnancy scare. Wary of a shameful loss of face in the judgmental Christian community she belongs to, she hurtles from one extreme of melodrama to the other, making sure to remind every unfortunate listening ear that she is sure of her virginity—borne from a particular series of agreements signed with God, her mother and any number of people. This prepares the stage for the possibility of immaculate conception as was granted the blessed virgin of Christendom—but the thesis is threatened by the mere fact that on an uncharacteristically unguarded night she shared with the lovedrunk Tunde (Tolu Bishop), she had serenaded him sufficiently enough to extract from his person, a few presumably healthy swimmers in the general area of the very orifice in her body designed to make those very swimmers into babies.
The first of the aforementioned listeners is Simisola (Seyi Sobowale), her friend whose inclusion in the play seems to be justified by a context-poor conversation about the modern woman’s inclination to marriage that she foists upon a hapless audience—a group, dear reader that had me as its most hapless member in the second scene of the play. Simisola advices a strip pregnancy test whose fruition is stalled by Olamide mistaking ‘PT’ for ‘pretty’ and a visit by Iya Shukura (played by the hilarious Oyindasola Taiwo), another character of expediency in a play that seemed to be built on actions and characters created solely to advance preconceived outcomes. The test finally happens under the very noisy and energetic auspices of Ify (Blessing Boyede), but it turns up invalid and furthers Olamide’s torment.
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As one does, they decide to go to the hospital to get a proper test done. Before the results arrive, she ruins Tunde’s evening by informing him of her pregnancy fears and blowing him off. Hurt and confused, he does what every frustrated young man expecting to be a father to a child he doesn’t remember making does: he delivers a monologue about how hard it is to resist having sex as a man in a world where women have boobs and routinely post them online. At length, we are gifted a resolution when the results are returned and the director (Bunmi Awolowo, also doubling as the writer), through the lead character’s mouth, takes us to church by prescribing an undefined ideal of sexual discipline as the actual moral of the play.
In all, 99% Virgin attempts to be a number of things one cannot really slam meaty fists on. A critique of marriage and the expectations for women in that system as is? Maybe that would have worked if there was serious and sequential treatment of the concept beyond Simisola’s discordant pitch. Perhaps, it functions as an examination of sex in a world that perplexingly has so much it yet speaks so little about it—especially in the case of celibacy, but it is too tropey and thus reliant on conclusions already telegraphed by theatre precedence elsewhere. In this vein, the play felt too safe for the veritably adult audience that came to see it. If inclined, one could even eke out an appraisal of religion from the play, but it came across more like Awolowo trying to incorporate laissez-faire radicalism in a bid to legitimise what was invariably a Christian outcome. This is even more baffling because there is no point in Whyte’s mildly Adjanic performance where you are not convinced that the only solution to her problems is a heavy serving of premarital sex.
But there is so much to enjoy in the play—so much in fact, that makes it very worthwhile regardless. Taiwo as Iya Shukura and Israel Audu most singularly as Dr. Prestige deliver beautiful and bold spins on characters drawing so much from a well-used pantheon of stocky Nigerian theatre humour that I think any lover of the tradition must experience. Additionally, the participatory audience also livens things up, especially when worked up nice by the play’s abundant melodrama, and the lovely use of the entire space as a sort of Lefebvrean third space where audience, actor and artefact happened concurrently, and ceaselessly was a genuine heart-warmer.
Please, support good theatre such as this as the play continues its run across all weekends in April (5:30pm & 7:30pm) at Terra Kulture on Victoria Island, Lagos.
99% Virgin is an interactive theatre experience by Signpost Studios Productions.
Credits:
Stage Manager: Oluwatomiwa Otun
Production manager: Chioma Jacinta
