What do you do when you are no longer in love with what you fell in love with? This is the question one walks away asking after watching Tyrone E. Terrence’s A Husband’s Wife.
The play, which was staged in Abuja on Saturday, March 18 at the Transcorp Hilton, dwells on the crises that can come to an ageing marriage, especially when the couple involved have grown apart over the years as they have developed individually in their personalities, careers and so on, rather than together.
The two-man cast – Ahide Adum, a multi-talented singer, music producer and actor (and elder brother of star Nigerian Idol contestant Honey Adum) and the versatile, also highly talented Chioma Omeruah – put on a stellar performance. The humour injected throughout the play in no way undermined the serious issues of love gone sour in a marriage, adultery, betrayal and the eventual tragic end to the story.
Femi (Ahide Adum) and Tomi (Chioma Omeruah), obviously both successful in their careers, have been married for 22 years and have three children who live in the United States. The play starts with Tomi confronting her husband as they are about to go to bed, over an affair her friend Susan has told her Femi is having. Femi eventually admits to the affair and also that the woman he’s seeing – Linda – is pregnant for him.
The play then takes one through Tomi’s reactions to Femi’s trying to explain why he’s having an affair. He tries to make his wife understand that she no longer pays him any attention or loves and adores him like she did when they first got married and that he needs the attention and near worship he gets from his much younger lover, who loves him for him, without throwing his failures, weaknesses and past in his face, because indeed she doesn’t know them, while his wife Tomi does that all the time. “I need to be somebody’s hero again…” is Femi’s passionate plea.
The different acts take us through their emotions of anger, bewilderment, desperation and even an unexpected moment of passion and fond reminiscing between the two. But the situation doesn’t change; Tomi cannot understand why Femi has betrayed her so, and Femi is resolved to leave his wife and move in with Linda. It turns out that Susan, Tomi’s friend who told her about the affair and pregnancy is actually Femi’s lover Linda. The story ends with Tomi giving Femi a last kiss – literally the last he’ll ever have, as she had put poison on her lips first. They both die, Tomi with her arms around her husband.
The playwright, Tyrone E. Terrence was born in Jamaica to a Jamaican father and Nigerian mother. He attended the University of Lagos. He now lives in Abuja and manages Rosewood Media Inc. Theatre Company. He has written over 20 plays, including Private Lies, A Husband’s Wife and A Pound of Flesh.
A writer/director and producer with many plays, documentaries and short films to his credit, his plays have featured the likes of Joke Silva, Richard Mofe-Damijo, Dede Mabiaku and Genevieve Nnaji among others and have been performed all over the world. He has also worked with the BBC World Trust Service as a writer/director and script editor, joining other creative minds from around the world to create and write the hit radio soap Story Story and as yet unequalled TV series Wetin Dey. Tyrone is the writer, director and producer of the TV series Living Large and Stitches and most recently produced and directed two radio plays for UNICEF in Akwa Ibom and Cross River States.