Writer: Lola Shoneyin (adapted by Rotimi Babatunde)
Director: Femi Elufowoju jr
Bolanle is an educated, beautiful, young graduate in Ibadan, Nigeria. When Baba Segi, a wealthy, illiterate local businessman and patriarch, asks if she’s going to get married now she’s finished university, she gets out a book and starts reading. But she does marry him, much to her mother’s disgust, and becomes Baba Segi’s fourth wife.
At this stage in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Bolanle’s reasons are only hinted at. She wants a man who won’t ask questions or “find my quietness unsettling”. This whydunit mystery forms part of the show’s emotional trajectory. The play is based on poet Lola Shoneyin’s iconic 2010 novel of the same name. The author writes in the programme that “a story about family love and deception has grown into something greater than I could have imagined.” Rotimi Babatunde’s adaptation, originally staged in 2018 and now revived, is simultaneously true to the spirit of the novel and radically different. This is dynamic theatre, full of movement and song, revelling in the “alchemy” between energetic stage and packed, responsive auditorium.
Dolapo Oni plays Bolanle with a touching combination of assurance and vulnerability. She is an excellent foil for Patrice Naiambana’s crass-but-charismatic Baba Segi. His other three wives, Iya Segi, Iya Tope and Iya Femi, are convincingly portrayed as very different individuals by (respectively) Kemi Adekoya, Christina Oshunniyi and Mofe Akande. They are all referred to simply as the mother (iya) of their eldest children, but each reveals her own distinct motivations. Oshunniyi’s portrait of troubling and troubled innocence is particularly poignant.
This is also flawless ensemble work, beautifully directed by Femi Elufowoju jr, with actors playing multiple roles and musical instruments in an unforgiving theatre-in-the-round configuration. The small stage, liberated from naturalistic sets, relies on Simisola Majekodunmi’s well-designed lighting and the versatile performers to transform it instantly into a range of settings: the lascivious Ayikara neighbourhood, “full of women whose faces glowed under ultraviolet lights” or the parched fields of coiled and split cassava shoots during a failed harvest.
Shola Ajayi’s vibrant costumes match this delicate balance between group and individual. The company all wear similar white vests or T-shirts with a wrapper or trousers, but each in different Nigerian fabrics. Choreographer Kemi Durosinmi and choral arranger Ayo-Dele Edwards channel the infectious rhythms of Yoruba music, songs and dance. There are undulating pulses of physical theatre to the percussive beat of talking drums and cowbells, rattles and dried gourds. The stage is only rarely and very deliberately silent and still.
The ensemble’s collective reactions to the drama in their midst operate in the same way as the chorus in a Greek tragedy, commenting, questioning, swinging between ritual and gossip. Baba Segi is tragedy’s classic flawed protagonist, puffed up with male pride in his swelling household and heading for a fall. There are times when he resembles King Lear, trusting his own self-delusions, or Macbeth, whose overreach turns his life into a walking shadow.
Elsewhere, the dynamics of betrayal are reminiscent of Othello and Shakespeare’s other jealous husbands. An extended metaphor involving a rotten guava recalls Claudio’s line in Much Ado: “Give not this rotten orange to your friend.” The common imagery highlights similar misogynistic ideas about women as marketable goods to be traded or sold. Babatunde writes in a programme note about our shared humanity: the more distant a setting seems, the more effectively it exposes “realities usually invisible in our lives.” Assault, domestic abuse and control, restrictive gender roles and expectations are universal themes. But the power dynamics are not simplistic: the “senior wife” Iya Segi starts her own business, successfully manipulating her husband and saying, “Men are like yam. You cut them how you like.”
A horrifying scene that ends with a rape victim sobbing as the rapist tells her: “You should be happy. You are a woman now. You should be thanking me,” starts with roars of laughter. This is a theatre company perfectly in control of the atmospheres they create. The impressively nuanced acting and direction illuminate oppression’s darkest corners, but somehow the predominant mood is generously joyful.
There are countless moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, scatological humour, fart gags. One epic and hilarious masturbation scene involves singing, dancing, drumming, a giant pot of Vaseline and a beaker of dry ice. Freedom is messy, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives concludes. If women (and men) survive to sample the world’s possibilities (“like an egg cracked open”), there may well be chaos along the way. Bag a ticket for this big-hearted rollercoaster of a production before it sells out.
Runs until 31 May 2025
