Rotimi and 
Death in the 
Arts vi Me co-inciaences aojar at one sorely: 
>-inadences do iar at one sorely: 
United States some twenty-three years earlier to dwell in a society 
to which she had traced her roots. Not just that, also after etching 
an imprint on the University of Ibadan community as distinguished 
teacher and ethno-cultural scholar . During her lying-in-state/ 
burial on the 11th of September 1999, notable among those 
commiserating with the University and her family was foremost 
playwright and director of theater, Olawale Gladstone Rotimi. 
He had just returned from a journey, a four- year sojourn in the 
Americas and came to bid farewell to Esi whom he knew largely 
by reputation. 
induced by hypotension. 
Ololade Bamidele 
about a year before, on August 19, 1 999, the African- 
American ethno-musicologist, theater director and 
pilgrim into traditional African polytheism, Esilokun 
Kinni-Olusanyin passed on at the University College 
Hospital , Ibadan. She had fallen victim to the 
malignance of advanced breast cancer. That was after leaving the 
WW Exactly a year after her demise on August 19, 2000, Rotimi 
f and Esi became fellow wayfarers. He died of a heart condition the tide of death and mourning turned loose on the larger 
Nigerian artistic community. On April 29, 2000, the 'hip cat', 
1.1 W IIIC The season itself had not been a particularly cheerful one as Zeal Onyia, popular music act who is reputed to have hit the 
highest trumpeting pitch in the country sank into the murk of 
cancer of the duodenum ; by May 31, it was Oyin Adejobi, 
renown performer and doyen of the folk theater. In August, the 
tide closed in on Sammie Akpabot, 'the oracle of Ibadan', multiinstrumentalist, 
composer/musicologist. Beyond these are, Joe 
Emordi, comedian and versatile player on the live and electronic 
stages who passed on in the aftermath of a series of strokes in 
August. Also, Jennifer Ossai, one of the rising stars in the 
firmament of the Nigerian home video , particularly known for 
her high profile sex role in the video, Glamour Girls. 
With the passing of Rotimi, Onyia; of Akpabot and Adejobi, 
an interesting phase of modernism in African arts and 
performance seems to be ending - the torchbearer phase of 
those who evolved at the interface between traditional art forms 
and the historically given Western forms/technologies of 
performance. They were originary figures striving to contain 
passing of Rotimi, 
Onyia; of Akpabot 
and Adcjobi, an 
interesting phase of 
modernism in 
African arts and 
performance seems 
to be ending —the 
torchbearer phase of 
those who evolved at 
the interface between 
traditional art forms 
and the historically 
given Western forms. <GLENDORA. HEVIEWx/lfr/tw; Quarterly on the -4mxV0I3@No2>
diverse energies and weave them into creative compacts that 
are both African and modern. 
Ola Rotimi trained as a dramatist in the United States of 
America and his major professional break came in 1968 
when he staged The Gods Are Not To Blame ,his adaptation 
of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as artistic director of the Ori- 
Olokun Theatre of the then University of Ife. He had earlier 
on graduated from Boston University, where his 
playwrighting career began with the 1963 production of To 
Stir The God of Iron, which however did not attain the profile 
of a rave script or performance . 
Between then and 1968, Rotimi took a Master's of Fine 
Art (M.F.A) degree in playwrighting and directing at Yale 
University, returned to Nigeria to a Research Fellowship of 
the University of Ife's (now Obafemi Awolowo University) 
Institute of African Studies. His play, Cast the First Stone was 
then performed by the Unife Playhouse, but like the first, it 
attracted scant attention from the viewing and critical public. 
Subsequently, when the Cultural Centre of the Institute 
GLENDORA REVIEW><African Quarter/yon rneAnsxVoi5@ti o2> <8> 
Renown playwright/theater director, Ola 
Rotimi 
OPPOSITE PAGE: 
Doyen of Folk theater, Oyin Ade/obi 
Zeal Onyia and wife 
I F the many 
directors on the 
Nigerian stage when 
he was alive, 
Rotimi held 
exception as one 
who more 
painstakingly sought 
out the best 
performing talents 
and patiently 
trained them to his 
standards. 
started out in 1968, he became director of its acting troupe 
- a post which afforded him the opportunity to experiment 
with his ideas on drama and theater. 
A tragic way of seeing was essential to Rotimi from the 
beginning and this seemed to mark a persistent refrain 
through much of his dramatic oeuvre. In his early outing 
with The Gods Are Not to B/ame, Rotimi's possible fascination 
with the tragic tended him toward its high literary form, he 
adapted from the mode of Sophocles' Greek classic an 
expression of a modernism depicting the inter-connected 
basis of human experience. It relates the story of a prince, 
Odewale, destined to kill his father and marry his mother, 
m the fashion of its Greek precursor. Though, in the 
process of re-contextualization, Rotimi serves slight twists to 
the overbearing determinism of the original and imbues 
the motivating Oedipus myth with 'local color' . 
And, it was from these early productions that he displayed 
a rare ambidexterity, as innovative playwright and exceptional 
director, which became the hallmark of what is known as
'Rotimi theater'. Kemi Atanda-llori writes that from then, 
"the major strength of Rotimi appears to lie in the excellent 
combination of the tragic and the comic, of music with 
action, and of mime with choreographed movements. With 
The Gods, Rotimi seems to have discovered his own elements 
and he integrates these fully into his next play(s)". 
Apart from The Cods which is possibly his better known 
play till date, Rotimi careered as playwright through some 
three remarkable phases: that of the historical plays, Kurunmi 
(1969), Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (1971); the brief 'absurdist' 
phase, Holding Talks (1970) and the politically charged 
social-oriented plays, If... (1979), Hopes of the Living Dead 
(1985), and more recently, Man Talks, Woman Talks. 
Though, as the dates of publication of the plays show, these 
are not essentializable phases describing the growth from 
one tendency to the other, they more than less make for the 
possibility of marking the varied reach of Rotimi's drama. 
Even, an offering like Hopes straddles the boundaries of 
the historical and social-oriented plays. 
GLENDORA REVIEW><African Quarterly on the ArtsxV0K@No2> 
In the first marked phase, the historical plays revolve 
around the figures of highly willed characters caught up in 
situations leading toward violence and warfare, it is then 
that both the choices they make and the peculiar excesses 
of their characters give the plays their tragic tenor. The 
eponymous heroes of Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, 
encounter different circumstances of war : the first being 
about the violent conflict between Ijaye and Oyo resulting 
from the wrongful installation of a king, Alaafin Adelu in 
the old Oyo kingdom to which Ijaye was vassal in the 
mid-nineteenth century. Here, as commander-in-chief of the 
Oyo army and leader in Ijaye, Kurunmi's moves to forestall 
the subversion of tradition couples with far-reaching 
aspirations which drive the plot to its disturbing 
denouement. The second unfolds varied factors (salient 
among which is an historically muted pecuniary motivation 
) informing the punitive expedition sponsored by the British 
against the ancient Benin Kingdom late in the nineteenth 
century. And Oba Ovonramwen's peculiar attempt at
II containing the unfolding mayhem. In dramas of power mind. He would write a play , do test productions of it and 
and privilege, high vaunting ambitions, intrigues, deception 
and ultimately tragedy, Rotimi zeroes in on the subtle and 
overt factors resolving into the failings of leadership and 
the ripple effects these have on society. 
While in Holding Talks, Rotimi could be said to have flirted 
with the mode of 'absurdist' drama in its representation of 
the problematics of 'regular' language to show the 
hollowness of meaning and action ; it also signaled a 
revision in the aesthetics of his dramaturgy which continued 
into and made remarkable exhibition in the socialorientation 
plays. The coterie of 'grand' characters which 
Rotimi cultivates in the historical plays give way to the ordinary 
folk. In Holding Talks, the protagonist is a barber in whose 
shop the text plays out . 
If... is perhaps one of the few Rotimi plays striking at an 
ardent social vision, it chronicles the lives of a group of 
ordinary people living in a tenement in some slum in Port 
Harcourt city. They are tenants to a wily landlord who 
threatens to evict them if they refuse to vote for his party at 
election time. This group of tenants bond themselves into 
some sort of social class seeking to stand up to the oppressor, 
which is what the landlord represents to them. 
Hopes of the Living Dead takes from the crisis of 1928-32 
at the Leper's Colony in Uzuoakoli (now in Imo State, 
Nigeria) to present a play suggestive of various levels of 
symbolic interpretation, and Our Husband Has Gone Mad 
Again (1977) is a punchy satire on the inane glories and 
cravings of the political class. 
Though Rotimi achieved much of his reputation as 
dramatist, it was as theater director/ practitioner that he 
attained unrivalled heights in his career. His proficiency in 
harnessing the resources of the theater to create unique 
performances became the essence of what is described as 
'Rotimi theater' . And beginning from his early years as 
artistic director of Ori-Olokun players in lle-lfe, Rotimi 
fashioned out and honed on a notion of theater thriving 
on a grandness in execution : disciplined spectacle, 
impressionistic stage designs, professionalized standards 
in dance , music etc. Of the many directors on the Nigerian 
stage when he was alive, Rotimi held exception as •one 
who more painstakingly sought out the best performing talents 
and patiently trained them to his standards. His production 
style was quite advanced : while many directors co-ordinated 
the music score to their productions through unison singing 
or at best with two part harmonies, one part being an 
improvisation on the main part, Rotimi achieved on his 
stage the feat of co-ordinating four-part harmonies to some 
of his productions. He was often described as a genius in 
cast and crowd management on stage. Few directors could 
rival him in co-ordinating large crowds in shifting scenes, 
and before he succumbed to passage he is speculated to 
have been working on a play with a cast of 500 players! 
For his mastery of details in theater organisation, both 
on and off-stage, Rotimi was generally credited as 'the superb 
technocrat of Nigerian theater.' He saw to it that all the 
standards of his productions were professional, and as 
quintessential crafts person, he was one who even while 
writing his plays had the details of directing at the back of 
<GLENDORA B T O W x ^ Qwmrtf on the Ans» 
I record these on video. Based on the range of 
interpretations brought to bear on the script by the players, 
Rotimi would then revise rough edges out of the script, 
braid in new insights and thereby sharpen subsequent 
productions of the play. 
In the vintage years of his career, during the late 1960s 
into the 1970s at the Ori-Olokun Theatre in Ife, a typical 
Rotimi production deployed the total resources of theater to 
the effect of drawing the audience into a rapturous compact 
with the players and the on-going presentation. This ability 
to suck the audience into the life-world of his productions 
depended as much on Rotimi's capacity to elicit deep 
emotional responses from his audience (which also drew to 
his theater criticisms of monotony) as on the ease of 
accessibility to his productions. And the latter has been a 
recurrent decimal by which some critics keep making 
distinctions between Rotimi's so called 'populist' 
playwrighting and presentation mode and the 'esoteric' mode 
of some of Wole Soyinka's offerings. 
In those years when Rotimi led the Ori-Olokun players, 
wrote about eight of his twelve plays for the group and 
assumed heights in his prowess as stage crafts person, it is 
reputed that each single production of his plays was a 
unique and 'new' presentation in its own right . Each 
succeeding production of a particular play was realized 
with the distinct freshness of an 'original', and with this, 
he must have produced hundreds of pieces of his plays 
as original theater . It was at this heights of his powers as 
playwright - director that Rotimi attempted some of his more 
enduring experiments, not only in the technical aspects of 
staging, but in his experiments with multi-lingualism which 
traverses I!...., Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again and 
Hopes of the Living Dead. These plays which are varied 
linguistic conurbations - what the literary theorist Mikhail 
Bakhtin describes as heteroglossia - have characters 
who speak straight English, pidgin versions of English and 
diverse Nigerian languages which are translated to and 
fro for the benefit of audiences not versed in certain 
accents. 
The tragic refrain pervading much of Rotimi's efforts as 
dramatist seemed to permeate into the closing part of his 
life: he passed on four months after his wife of about three 
decades, the French-Canadian Hazel Mae Gaudreau, did 
without finishing some of the grand projects he had 
committed himself to for some time. He spoke of some 
new plays about to be completed which would take his 
career into newer levels; he also had intended to revive 
the 1960s/70s Ife Festival of the Arts and the Ori-Olokun 
Theatre with its theater-in-the-round style of performances 
reminiscent of the earlier Yoruba Alarinjo theater. These are 
tasks, it would seem, bequeathed to succeeding generations 
of drama and theater devotees - if only to affirm the dictum: 
life is short, art is eternal.GR
oa .