Monday, July 2, 2018

Mr. Ogezi’s new play examines the fears, struggles and triumphs of the downtrodden in a class-restive society. With deft utilization of stage resources and verisimilitude, humanity is depicted with telling imaginative empathy in a ghoulish dramatization that embeds reality in fiction. This Side of the Dead mirrors the class tensions inherent in a third-world country and their attendant consequences. It is about the lives of two brothers caught in the vortex of a soulless world. Michael, an expelled final-year law student on asylum at his elder brother’s construction site home, unwittingly manages to attract love from Susan, an American-born daughter of a Nigerian Cabinet Minister. Unfortunately, his ambivalence to this love does not suffice in stopping the huge price which the poor must pay for crashing the party of the rich and the powerful.