Not only emotion, but also sympathy, outcry, agony and supplication for help that indeed surrounded the circumstances of the Women of Owu. The play which is on now at the National Theatre, Lagos, is the re-enactment of part of the 19th Century Yoruba wars in which the city of Owu was besieged for several years by the combined forces of Ife, Ibadan, Ijebu and Oyo. Owu people had been recalcitrant to the rest of Yoruba and this was not a welcome development.
With the students of the Drama department of the Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos, involved in the play this year, it was easy to notice the level of resilience and stage craft and mobility which the youthful artistes brought to bear on the play. Watching them on stage showed that there is indeed hope for the stage theatre in Nigeria today.
Their ability to raise the tempo of the play, their ability also to highlight and interpret the nuances in very emotional and sympathetic ways embedded in the play helped the scenes to register in the minds of the audience. The play itself is a dirge. It is a dirge anchored on the sorrows of women who had to face the humiliation of defeat. After the city was razed and pillaged, the palace was despoiled, while some of the shrines were profaned and burnt to ashes.
In this devastating scenario only women were left. All the men of the city had been beheaded. The idea, more or less, was never to let Owu people breed men any more. It was to teach them an everlasting lesson not to dare the rest of the Yoruba nation in future. And this worked because on and on the women wept, cursed and mourned and moaned. Yet no help or intervention came from anywhere.
The more the women wept, recounting how their woes and problems began and hoping upon hope to have some respite, the more the invading soldiers taunted and hounded them to submission. It was such a harrowing and colossal situation that Professor Femi Osofisan, the playwright, was able to capture and embellish the play with surplus dances and songs.
The dances and the songs were well handled by the student actors and actresses. The total epitome and beauty of the play was found in the flexibility of the dancers whose sorrowful dirges indeed helped in defining the historical importance and sequence of the invasion. The whole episode is the total manifestation of what historical issues can do to encourage people look back into time. Osofisan was detailed in his presentation, he looked succinctly at the nuances of the people, even the stubbornness of an average Owu person in those days was replicated over time to make it a vivid historical play.
In the end, the dramatic effects of what he did become a point of reference. History is replete with such events that touched the society in various core areas of their social, political and economic lives. The idea of staging the play is to help students who would offer English Literature in the next West African School Certification Examination, (WASCE). It is part of the syllabus and so it is imperative that the play is staged now to help literature students master the techniques of the book better. It is to show them practical theatre.
Basically, this was why young undergraduate students were used to propel it on. The age range is not too far from what the secondary students can easily identify with. In fact, their deep involvement in the play on stage, showed that they too got infused into the story itself. They were carried away by the emotional aspects of the story, swinging away on stage, attired in simple costumes with other dirty and local linens, just to totally depict the sorry situation of the women of Owu.
As soon as you enter the cinema hall of the National Theatre where the play was staged, the first attraction is the splendour of the stage. Built by Biodun Abe, the newly appointed Director of Abuja Carnival, the simple village setting embossed on the painting on stage made the whole exercise look real and convincing. Known for his practical and daring attitude to stage décor and mesmerisation, Abe confessed that he did the stage to register a real village pattern of the time and to also situate the historical relevance of the story. “The people have to see what the rural life of the people was like in those days. This was a bush path, very narrow indeed, through which movements from place to place were made possible in those days. This becomes your first point of contact as soon as you enter the cinema hall,” he said.
The representation of mud houses and the thick bushes on both sides of the village settlement, the desolate nature of the village further defined that the people were at war. The whole village was deserted and that in itself evoked profound pity. Abe drew on people’s emotions with that stage design that you needn’t be told that a core professional was at work to give opulence to a play that still remains poignant in the annals of Yoruba history. The play dissects love, it treats romance, intrigues, backbiting and it especially dwells on why most powerful men of history marry or fall in love with bitches.
With total and bewitching beauties, most of the women were able to hoodwink powerful generals of the invading armies to evade punishment and possible death. They all added to the import of the power of female anatomy, but also gave the play its proper place as an epic, a didactic expose of the norms of the people and their likes and dislikes.
