Powerful Female Characters in Film and Theatre Highlighting the Struggles of Women
Strong female leads are some of the driving forces of the theatre and film art forms. Recent productions such as ‘King of Boys’ which features Sola Sobowale and Toni Tones as old and young versions of the lead character Eniola Salami respectively, spotlight the unique strengths and struggles of women.
In theatre, however, the women who featured in MTN Foundation sponsored musical ‘Flower the Musical’ stand out for their delivery of the complex issues confronting Nigerian women today.
The two-hour musical monologue which had its second outing this year, tells the story of six women – a faithful wife, an accused murderer, a corporate leader, a religious hopeful, a trophy wife and a sex worker, who navigate complex issues relating to their existence in a modern Nigerian society while promoting the emancipation of discriminated women.
Tosin Adeyemi plays a victim of female genital mutilation who waits for five years that her unfaithful husband would return home and fall in love with her again. Her husband, on the other hand, prefers to remain with a sex worker called, Lady of the Night, played by singer Waje. On the surface, Waje seems unbothered by her libertine ways. Her clients are mostly married men. But beneath all that powerful exterior is a victim of rape. She was sexually abused by her father. The only escape from the trauma was to become a sex worker.
Nini Mbonu plays the typical trophy wife, who got married to satisfy her mother. Her life seems perfect, but she is infantilised and treated like another piece on her husband’s collection of shiny things. She is ultimately trapped in her marriage. Meanwhile, Elvina Ibru embodies the woman by the book character, a religious woman who is unable to conceive after several years in marriage. She feels compelled by societal expectations to procreate and becomes desperate as she approaches menopause. There is also Oluchi Odii who killed her rapist and is serving time in jail. She is rebuked by everyone who couldn’t understand why she had resorted to taking revenge on the man who raped her. Ufuoma McDermott typifies the boss lady. She is one of the biggest lawyers in the city; a very successful woman who reached the peak of her career, but not without having to work twice as hard as her male counterparts. Despite her success, she doesn’t win the love and respect of her parents who made it clear that they would have preferred a male child.
The musical starkly exposes and reminds victims that they are not alone in their struggles as it spotlights the injustices they suffer to create conversations around them.
“We found the story very intriguing. Over the years, it has been tough for women. Not every woman speaks out, but we find this gives a lot of strength to women to know they’re not alone whenever they go through things like rape, genital mutilation, abandonment, and neglect. So, for us, it’s a way to leapfrog a very important part of the social segment, which is the women and also the men,” says the Executive Secretary, MTN Foundation, Odunayo Sanya.