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Abstract
Femi Osofisan is one of the most prominent contemporary Nigerian dramatists, with over fifty plays to his name. This corpus includes numerous adaptations, mostly from classic Western theatre. This article begins by addressing plays by Osofisan that are not adaptations, but that represent critical engagements with fellow Nigerian dramatists. Using a theoretical underpinning drawn from translation theory, it then analyzes the adaptations, focusing especially on those works in which Osofisan’s dramaturgy is most audacious and challenging, especially in its bringing differing historical periods into contact and conflict.
Acknowledgments
An early version of this article was commissioned as a keynote paper for a conference on Post-Negritude literature held in 2016 at the University of Ibadan. In the event I was unable to attend, as my visa application was mishandled by the Nigerian High Commission, Johannesburg. My thanks to the conveners of the conference, Sola Adeyemi and Duro Oni, if not to the Nigerian High Commission. My gratitude to friends and colleagues who have helped me source material to complete this article: Bernth Lindfors, Patrick Ebewo, Jane Plastow, Sola Adeyemi and James Gibbs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This is not to deny the value—indeed, often necessity—of literal, word-for-word translation, as in exercises for foreign language learners or in the translation of textbooks. Ladmiral draws a distinction between version (literal translation) and traduction (freer translation, as in the field of literature).
2 Various models have been devised to account for a spectrum of approaches to the source / target spectrum: see, for example, Samuel Ravengai’s distinction between the Black Orpheus approach, the Black Athena approach, and re-historicization.
3 Of course, it is possible for a dramatist to take an existing play as a starting-point or inspiration—without entering into a critical engagement with the earlier work. An example would be Wole Soyinka’s King Baabu, sub-titled A Play in the Manner—Roughly—of Alfred Jarry.
4 Although the title of his play does not signal an antecedent play in the way Another Raft (The Raft) and No More the Wasted Breed (The Strong Breed) clearly do, Jane Plastow has argued that Morountodun is, at least in part, a homage, critique and at times a satire of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. Plastow’s argument is taken up and extended in Adeyemi 92-93.
5 For a discussion of Osofisan’s play in relation to the dramatist’s radical approach to history and to the theory of class, see Hutchison.
6 To the best of my knowledge, Osofisan’s play has not seen the light of day.
7 The unexamined plays include adaptations of Max Frisch’s Andorra, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Although to the best of my knowledge Osofisan works from texts in English of in English translation, one might refer to his tradaptations, a term used to describe a work that is neither translation nor adaptation, but one that has to do with cultural critique and with negotiation, a process of moving between different sites, critically reviewed, in order to achieve a new text.
8 This is taken from the blurb to the novel.
9 The stage adaptation was made by Lyndersay, with the published version being revised by Osofisan. Patrick Ebewo, who witnessed the process of adaptation as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan has pointed out to me “Lyndersay’s crafting of the [adaptation] has sometimes been fully ascribed to Osofisan” (PE pers.comm., 01.03.21)
10 This passage resonated with lines from Soyinka’s poem “Elegy for a Nation”: “have the rigours of survival bred a race / of naked predators? Is sharing out of fashion? / Community a dirty word, service an obscenity?” (Soyinka 2002a, 74).
11 As my discussion of “Discombobulation” and the play of Kolera Kolej should make clear, I have no problems with the use of a Narrator per se.
12 Under the Sani Abacha dictatorship, with his highly vocal critic Soyinka in exile, productions of even such an innocuous play (and schools’ set-text) as The Trials of Brother Jero were closed down.
13 I focus largely on the latter, as the former is extensively addressed in Dunton 1998 and in an exceptionally insightful and provocative essay by Barbara Goff, who points out that African adaptations of classical texts “struggle with the very fact that the presence of Greek and Roman classics within African culture, however fruitful for creative endeavour, testifies to the disruption of African history by decades of colonial exploitation. Most such adaptation address more or less explicitly the ways in which the conditions of their possibility can also undermine their project” (Goff 2006, iii).
14 Felix Budelmann draws the following parallels between ancient texts and their African adaptations, parallels not so much found in modern Western adaptations (such as jean Anouilh’s Antigone): “choruses and the presence of some kind of public; the extensive use of music and dance; and the importance of the supernatural” (Budelmann Citation2005 139).
15 Praise name for the Oba, here used by Claudius ironically.
16 In respect of the ability of the actors playing the surviving characters to find space in which to move around, the closing scene of the play is logistically easier to produce on film than on stage.
17 For a detailed account of the play, especially strong on the gains and losses in Osofisan’s adaptation, see Budelmann 2006.
18 As in Western rhetoric on the war in Iraq.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Chris Dunton
Chris Dunton has taught at universities in Nigeria, Libya and South Africa and was most recently professor and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho. He is now a freelance scholar based in the UK.