'Where's My Groom?': Joy Isi Bewaji delivers the most unsettling theatre experience you will have this July

Picture Nene Aliemeke walking onto a stage alone in a wedding gown and not leaving until she has made you feel the full weight of a woman you would probably judge on sight. That is the job of Where's My Groom? and it does it quite well.

The play, written and directed by Joy Isi Bewaji, follows a woman whose life is simply a list of things that were asked of her before she was old enough to refuse. Parentified from childhood, financially responsible for a household that still had parents in it, and the person who got into Bitcoin early just to use the money to carry everyone else. 

Then a man came along who felt like the first thing that was just for her, and for a time, he was, until he left and married her sister instead. Now she is in that dress, wanting something she cannot quite name, making decisions that make you want to look away in irritation. 

The script does not soften any of this. It also does not hand Aliemeke a supporting cast to help carry the logic of it. She plays the woman and only the woman, and somehow, you never feel the absence of anyone else. 

That alone should tell you something about what kind of performer she is. She is known to Nigerian audiences largely from The Origin: Madam Koi-Koi on Netflix, where she played Edna, but this is an entirely different register because there is nothing to hide behind here.

What Bewaji is really writing about is the gap between how we see women like this character and what actually made them that way. The desperation, the bad choices, and the behaviour that edges toward satire in how extreme it gets. 

The play insists that you follow the thread back to where it started, which is a whirlwind of neglect, betrayal, and a loneliness that looks like instability from the outside. It is an uncomfortable watch, intentionally so, and the discomfort is the point.

Aliemeke also has a specific relationship with the audience that is worth mentioning. She moves through the space, finds people in the crowd, asks questions, holds eye contact long enough to make it mean something.

The room responded with laughter, shock, and people talking back, and none of it felt like a disruption. It felt instead like the play was working exactly as intended.

Where's My Groom? runs every Sunday at 5 pm for the rest of July.

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