In the human Angle, Okoli interrogates love, betrayal

In the month of May, the private cultural centre, Terra Kulture, Lagos, hosted a series of performances of The Human Angle written by Ozi Okoli and directed by Ifeanyi Eziukwu. Alliance Francaise also had a dose of this play in June.

The play dwells on love and betrayal. It also looks at the challenges of marriages without children, especially in Africa. In the play, Chukwuemeka, an innocent husband, is faced with the challenge of taking a second wife to end the provocation of his impatient mother, who keeps threatening his childless wife.

It turns out that one of the girlfriends of Chukwuemeka’s friend is suggested as the anointed woman to bear children for him. As fate will have it, there is pregnancy, but ironically, it is not for Chukwuemeka, who had played along as the husband of the lady, because while they remained married, his conscience did not allow him to go into the woman.

The moment of peripeteia, however, comes when there is a miscarriage of the pregnancy, and Chukwuemeka’s wife is pregnant. The mother in-law who treats her with so much disdain suddenly changes when she learns of the pregnancy.

In this play, the writer interrogates the different angles to life: the human and God’s. He reveals that when people disrupt natural order, bringing in their angle into things, they complicate issues.

Chukwuemeka’s mother bringing other angles into the marriage creates tension that leads to betrayal. Speaking on the play, Okoli said, “in most cases, you don’t need a human angle for some things, either you allow the natural angle to take its cause or the God angle itself, natural angles shift towards God but when you want to help nature or God, conflict now sets in.”

Okoli said, “I want a situation whereby, people respect their boundaries and stop bringing angles that are not supposed to be in people’s lives. Life can be meaningful, enjoyable, peaceful, long or even short, it depends, but it’s for you enjoy it, there must be limits to interferences, especially in the African concept like the Ibo culture, when you don’t have especially a male child, it’s a problem, now imagine that you don’t have at all, we must look at these things critically, we are in the modern age, let people live their lives.”

On the choice of theme, Okoli said, “families are grappling with a lot of things; no mother should come and add insult to injury. Just like people are crying out ‘we are hungry’ and all of a sudden, they say let’s change the national anthem, as if that is what is going to make things work out.

“Some people should be happy that they have just one child, or they are yet to have for now, so we can cope but these mother in-laws don’t even want to know the situation in the country.”