“Dear Kaffy” is a hilarious jeremiad

A sharp, funny, and painfully familiar portrait of modern Nigerian womanhood, Dear Kaffy, turns heartbreak into humour and celebrates the fierce power of female friendship.

Sometimes we laugh just to keep ourselves from crying. This is the overwhelming sentiment one feels as one sits through the two-hour-long play, Dear Kaffy: Diary of a Single Woman . It’s a laugh-out-loud musical comedy from the stables of Bolanle Austen-Peters Production (BAP), which had a three-day run at the Shaw Theatre in London in August.

The play premiered in Lagos to sold-out performances before moving to Pretoria and now London.

The writer and director of the play, Bolanle Austen-Peters, famous for films like The Bling Lagosians , Man of God and most recently Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti , turns a harsh searchlight on the pressures women face as their biological clocks begin to tick or when they are “5 minutes from 40 years.”

From that point, the play expands into a jeremiad of pain and a sad litany of heartbreak, with the female characters Kike (as protagonist) and Bidemi and Shalewa acting as chorus and cheerleaders.

Kike’s story is a familiar one. Accomplished academically and career-wise, she is, however, still considered deficient until she brings home a man to marry her.

And so, to satisfy her parents, siblings and society, she finds herself on a merry-go-round of men who use and dump her.

There is Femi, handsome and as slick as a snake oil salesman, who cheats on her with her friend and then tells her at the end that “I am fresh, I am fly and I want to be free.”

After Femi comes Tamuno, a gym rat who sees Kike as no more than “my financial backbone.” He will not commit and is a no-show when Kike invites him to meet her parents.

Despite putting herself through these indignities at the hands of men described by her father as “bottom barrel”, she still has to deal with weddings of younger relatives, which she is forced to attend, participate in and smile through.

From the reaction of the audience to the vignettes and jokes, Dear Kaffy is a familiar story and proof that, for many, the play was a mirror reflecting their own images back to them.

Photo: BAP Productions

Brilliant performances

Uzor Osimkpa is the preening Kike who, despite “being first in everything” at school, fails abjectly when it comes to matters of the heart. She plays Kike with superb control and aplomb, segueing seamlessly from accomplished career woman to a love-struck woman and relationship addict.

Akah Nnani is brilliant as Tamuno, the gym rat who plays Kike’s heartstrings like a harp just to make enough to set up a gym. The character of Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading kept coming to mind. And he can hold a tune.

Toyin Abraham, the Nollywood stalwart making her stage debut, is impressive as Mummy Wa, who, with her husband Daddy Wa, played by Lookman Sanusi, contributes to Kike’s heartache and anxiety

Tamuno and Femi do her dirty and leave her used, played and made to look the fool; she is so traumatised that when a good man appears on the horizon, she is blinded by the glare of her past disappointments.

Dear Kaffy is a Lagos play, but coming to London, the playwright has attempted to transpose some of it to London with jokes about Buckingham Palace and “helping him get his papers.”

The play has humour in spades, and many had the audience reeling with laughter. When Kike goes on the defensive, Debo shuts her down with “this is not a podcast” and when Kike begins to wax poetic about what she wants in a man, her sister Tolani is quick with a sharp rebuke: “Face the universe and leave that metaverse you are in” and then when trouble looms between her and Debo, Tolani returns with a line that had the audience in stitches – “Even if a man catches you red handed you deny, deny and deny.”

Girl power triumphs eventually as Kike finds her fire after her friends tell her that “any man would kill to have you.”

Dear Kaffy is, in that sense, not just a jeremiad of love, but a paean to female friendship and empowerment.

The post “Dear Kaffy” is a hilarious jeremiad appeared first on New African Magazine .