The Room Where It Happens, EL Double V Arts’ new production directed by Babatunde Lawal from a script he co-wrote with Bukky Tijani, starts with a setup that feels immediately familiar: four strangers, one room, four different reasons for being there, and the growing suspicion that somebody is lying. What makes the setup work is […]
9 months ago
The Room Where It Happens, EL Double V Arts’ new production directed by Babatunde Lawal from a script he co-wrote with Bukky Tijani, starts with a setup that feels immediately familiar: four strangers, one room, four different reasons for being there, and the growing suspicion that somebody is lying. What makes the setup work is not the mystery itself but the way the play populates that room with people who feel recognisably Nigerian before they become symbols of anything.
The first act is particularly good at finding comedy in the small social negotiations Nigerians will recognise almost immediately. Tega wants to make content out of everything. Funke is irritated by almost everyone. Bayo has a Bible verse, prayer or spiritual explanation ready for practically any situation. Dr Uche is the one person determined to remain rational while everyone else is losing the plot. The jokes come from their personalities rather than from the production trying too hard to be funny, and that gives the early scenes an easy rhythm.
Desmond Jegede’s Tega is perhaps the most immediately entertaining of the four. He reaches for his phone almost instinctively, treating the room and its increasingly strange circumstances as content before he treats them as danger. Jegede understands the ridiculousness without playing Tega as simply ridiculous. Beneath the jokes is a young man who has become very good at performing a version of himself for other people. The phone is not just a prop. It is the thing between him and the possibility of having to confront what he has actually done with his life.
Ojo Damilola’s Funke is built from a different kind of familiarity. Her exchanges with Tega, initially play as regular friction, but Damilola gradually gives the character more weight. Funke is the dependable one, the person who has become so accustomed to carrying other people that responsibility has become part of her identity. When the play reveals that she witnessed corruption at work and chose not to speak up, the revelation works because the character has already been established as someone who survives by managing problems rather than confronting them. Her silence is not presented as cartoonish wickedness. It is cowardice, exhaustion and self-preservation, which is considerably more uncomfortable.
Afolayan Samuel gives Bayo some of the production’s funniest moments. His increasingly desperate spiritual declarations are exactly the kind of comic release the first act needs. But Bayo becomes more interesting when the laughter begins to wear off. His faith has become a way of postponing difficult decisions, and his failure to report the disappearance of church funds places him inside the same moral problem as everyone else in the room. He is not corrupt because he does not know right from wrong. He is corrupt because knowing is easier than acting.
Damsel’s Dr Uche has the least obvious comic material and perhaps the most difficult role to balance. She is the sceptic, the person who keeps looking for a rational explanation while the room becomes increasingly impossible to explain. Her story about repeatedly considering leaving the country gives the character another kind of paralysis. She has made plans, packed bags and imagined another life, but somehow remains where she is. The play uses her to tap into the peculiar exhaustion of a generation for whom leaving Nigeria can feel both like a practical decision and an admission of defeat.
This is where The Room Where It Happens becomes more than a clever escape-room thriller. The four characters begin to look less like four people who happened to end up in the same room and more like four different ways of avoiding difficult choices. Tega performs instead of confronting himself. Funke calls responsibility strength. Bayo turns faith into delay. Uche turns preparation into another form of postponement. The room simply removes their usual excuses.
The horror therefore works best when it is psychological rather than supernatural. The unseen force that has brought them together is frightening, but what makes the premise linger is the question underneath it: what happens when all the things we keep postponing are suddenly put in front of us at once? The production does not need a complicated mythology to make that question work. The characters have already done most of the work.
Lawal’s direction keeps the production moving without allowing the single-room setting to become visually monotonous. That is not an easy task. A room can become visually flat very quickly, particularly when the dramatic action depends heavily on dialogue. Here, the changing relationships between the characters provide some of the movement, but the lighting does a considerable amount of the atmospheric work.
Adetoye Champion Adeyemi deserves particular credit for this. His lighting does not simply illuminate the actors. It changes our relationship with the room. The warmer, more ordinary atmosphere of the opening allows the comedy to breathe, making the space initially feel like somewhere these four people could actually have been invited to. As the evening becomes more unsettling, the lighting begins to withdraw that familiarity. Shadows become more useful, the room feels less open, and the same physical space starts to look increasingly hostile.
That progression is important because the production wisely does not try to make the room frightening from the beginning. If everything had been dark and ominous from the first scene, there would be nowhere for the atmosphere to go. Adeyemi allows the room to become strange gradually, which gives the later shifts considerably more weight. The lighting becomes another way of telling us that the characters’ understanding of their situation is changing.
There is also a nice relationship between the lighting and the performers. During the funny scenes, the room feels open enough for the characters to bounce off one another. As suspicion begins to take over, the space becomes more compressed. Faces disappear into shadow at moments when we would rather know what someone is thinking. The effect is subtle, but it works precisely because it is not constantly announcing itself.
Adeyemi’s contribution to the production’s visual language deserves recognition as well, particularly in how the technical elements are brought together. The set, lighting and performance space work as a single environment rather than feeling like separate departments competing for attention. The room remains recognisable throughout, but its emotional temperature keeps changing.
There is, however, a point where the writing begins to explain what the actors and design have already made clear. The Voice is most effective when it is simply threatening, because the audience can begin to work out what the room is doing to these people. At other points, it spells out the metaphor too directly, explaining what each character represents and what the audience is supposed to take from their stories. Those moments take some of the mystery out of a play that is otherwise quite good at letting the audience make connections for itself.
The second half also carries the weight of having to resolve four individual stories while maintaining the tension of the central premise. Not every revelation lands with the same force, and some of the explanations arrive more neatly than the characters themselves have earned. The production is at its strongest when it is allowing the four people in the room to argue, deflect, joke and accuse one another. It is slightly less interesting when it pauses to tell us exactly what all of that behaviour means.
Still, there is something encouraging about the ambition of The Room Where It Happens. EL Double V Arts has found a premise that allows comedy and suspense to sit alongside a very Nigerian anxiety about time, responsibility, escape and the consequences of waiting too long. The production does not treat those concerns as abstract national problems. It puts them inside four recognisable people and locks the door.
Produced by David Wealth and Bukky Tijani, with Lawal directing and Adetoye Champion Adeyemi making a particularly strong contribution to the atmosphere through his lighting and production design, the production has the feel of a company discovering what it can do. It is not perfectly controlled yet, and the script would benefit from trusting its audience a little more, but there is enough craft here to suggest that EL Double V Arts is worth watching.
The best thing about The Room Where It Happens is that once the jokes begin to fall away, the room becomes harder to laugh in. These are not terrible people. They are people who have each found a way to live with something they know they should have confronted. The horror is simply what happens when there is nowhere left to hide from it.
