Ancient Songs Set Ablaze

Reviewed by: Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan Tejumola Olaniyan Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre Of Femi Osofisan. Sandra L. Richards. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996; pp. xiv + 203. $21.95 paper. Ancient Songs Set Ablaze is a long overdue study of one of the most resourceful playwrights on the African continent. Femi Osofisan is the leading Nigerian playwright of the generation immediately after Wole Soyinka and John P. Clark-Bekederemo, and the third most prolific on the continent after Soyinka and Athol Fugard. If Osofisan is not as well-known internationally, it is partly because, unlike Soyinka and Fugard, he started out with a commitment exclusively to local publishing of his works. Thus we are obliged to register an incommensurability between Osofisan’s dramatic stature at home and the fact that he is only now being “discovered” in America. In the last five years, he has staged his plays at several American universities, and received a commission from at least one major theatre; and in 1995, Howard University Press issued a collection of his plays, The Oriki of a Grasshopper and Other Plays. Sandra L. Richards’s detailed study, the first book-length analysis of the dramatist’s works, propels the tide of recognition further. Richards divides her study—and thus Osofisan’s plays—into three parts: “Realistic Protest Plays,” “Toward a Popular Theatre?” and “A Contemporary African Theatre.” Though Richards makes it clear that these bear no chronological relationship, it is evident that they are arranged in at least a preferential order. The “realistic” plays discussed in the three chapters of Part One project an “ultimately pessimistic critique” (1), while the particular comic tradition appropriated by the comedies examined in Part Two also risks “undercut[ting] a socially critical project” (50). Part Three explores the plays considered to be the most technically and ideologically sophisticated. And apparently, critically demanding too, for it is the three chapters here that bear the full weight of Richards’s critical and theoretical arsenal. It is designed to meet the more ambitious of the book’s two goals: to “delineat[e] major constructs of a theory of contemporary African theatre” (viii); the other one being to “survey a specific body of dramatic material” (viii). Richards’s tripartite structure, based on the plays’ aesthetic and ideological affinities, is a handy way to impose some meaningful order upon a vastly heterogeneous body of work. But those unconvinced by such a division could focus on the readings of individual plays, where they will certainly be [End Page 87] rewarded with a wealth of keen insights and a model of close reading. Particularly praiseworthy is Richards’s careful tracing of Osofisan’s dramaturgic appropriations of Marxism and the philosophical and interpretive paradigms offered by Esu and Orunmila, Yoruba mythological figures, to suggest a theoretical approach to the dramatist’s works (119–25). One other vital strength that Richards, an accomplished director, brings to this work is a critical sensitivity to details in context. Indeed, one of the more stimulating aspects of Richards’s critical readings is the incorporation of thoughtful insights about possible directorial approaches to specific scenes and the meanings they could engender in specific audiences. This is in keeping with Richards’s interest in the plays both as literature and as theatre, even where records of performances are unavailable. This practice provides excellent context for the postscript where Richards gives an extended account of her production of Osofisan’s Farewell to a Cannibal Rage at Stanford University. This account usefully complements the earlier reading of the play in chapter 6, and shows in sharp relief the different though related sets of challenges that face both the literary and theatre critic, as well as the director; these challenges are further complicated by the fact that the director in this case is transplanting such a culturally marked practice as theatre into a different context. But Richards does not always keep her dual focus. For instance, there is a general over-fixation with labeling—more properly the concern of the literary critic—than the conditions of staging and audience—the business of the theatre critic. On the whole, the labels turn out to

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