Ẹnu dùn ń rò’fọ́…: Theatre design, audience cognition and dramatic adaptation of Fagunwa’s texts

Abstract

The stage performance of Langbodo, a play, which Nigerian dramatist Wale Ogunyemi adapted from Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which, in turn, is a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s prose, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀. 'The bold hunter in the daemon-infested forest', exposed the limitation of the text as a bearer of meaning in the theatrical adaptation context. The limitation is analysed in this work to justify the centrality of adaptation in bridging the text-design-audience semiotic gap. This study examines the technical challenges of theatre design in D. O. Fagunwa’s works resulting from their adaptation as drama. The Yoruba apothegmatic idiom, Ẹnu ‘dùn ń rò’fọ́, agada ọwọ́ ṣeé ṣán’ko (which means, literally, that ‘vegetable soup can be prepared orally if a mere hand suffices for a cutlass’), a traditional derision for the inadequacies of the text, and the Barthesian notion of intertextuality serve as a dual theoretical structure in this study. A combination of methodologies including participant observation and ethnographic approach suffice for the retrieval and analysis of performance materials, respectively. Therefore, the study contends that the process of stage adaptation in Wale Ogunyemi’s play, Langbodo, used the technical contributions of theatre design, as a catalyst for connecting Fagunwa’s ideas to the final audience.