Oladipo Agboluaje: Plays One. Oladipo Agboluaje
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and postmodernism. Whatever their relations both discourses, together, have expanded the space for new writings in prose, poetry, live art, and dramatic texts and have produced, in their wakes, what I consider to be a third generation of writers distinguishable from their first- and second-generation forebears in three important respects. Firstly, while the first generation accepted and lamented their sojourner second-class citizenship, the second generation rejected all that and asserted their rights of citizenship, of belonging and place (see Proctor, 2000 and McMillan, 2006). Secondly, third-generation writers are unequivocal and confident about their place in society; they celebrate their dual heritage with vigour and ideological radicalism, whilst abjuring the angst of their predecessors. Thirdly, third-generation writers and writings adopt different tropes, from indigenous African and Asian conventions as well as from postcolonialism and postmodernism, they draw their subjects and inspirations from both discourses and write specifically for heterogeneous audiences and multicultural societies with different layers of interdependencies. Their constituencies are polyphonic, simultaneously local and diasporic. Even when they historicise particular experiences or are set in home continents and societies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean – as are two of the plays in this volume – their subjects and characters link cultural geographies in a literary space of incredibly diverse stylistic influences in which indigenous, postcolonial and postmodern conventions converge to create a literary topography that is simultaneously local and ‘glocal’, the term used by Giovanna Buonanno, Victoria Sams and Christane Schlote (2011: 1, 14) to describe British Asian theatre’s capacity to mirror cultural peculiarities without losing its global frame.
In the online article ‘Black British Literature since Windrush’ written as part of the BBC Windrush season for the Summer of 1998, Onyekachi Wambu (1998) highlighted what I consider key characteristics of third-generation Black British writing: ‘it announced a literature that would look back to its source, but would be far more self-confident about its own position in Britain. It wouldn’t be marginalised as ‘Black’, ‘Commonwealth’ or any other kind of literature that put it at the edges. It would be a fully fledged member of the broad range of British writing.’ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/literature_01.shtml.] Their subjects derive directly and indirectly from the unfinished socio-political and cultural agendas started by first-generation but tackled more fully by second-generation writers; existential angsts, social deprivations, problems of agency, racism, identity crisis, racial tensions, diaspora and the politics of migration and dislocation and their off-shoots of family and group dynamics, social fragmentations, cultural radicalism, religious fundamentalism, sexualities and critical self-examination. Third-generation writers are neither segregationist and insular nor motivated by celebrating cultural monolithism and the past. Although rooted in the struggles and subjects of their predecessors, as we see in the works of Fred D’Aguiar, Tunde Ikoli, Paul Boakye, Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal and many more, these writers rewrite Britain (Proctor, 2000; Sierz, 2011) and destabilise hegemonies and geographies of place, time, history and location. In essence, contesting territorialities in what Michael McMillan (2006) describes with regards to Black British writers and performers, as ‘reimagining of the self in a cultural and political context, where identities are continuously fragmented and hybridised’ (McMillan, 2006: 60).
In this increasingly polyphonic and pluralistic theatrical landscape the number of theatre companies, such as Talawa, Tiata Fahodzi, Tara, and Tamasha that aim their works primarily at more than one of the many sections of Britain’s multicultural society, has grown. The creative possibilities for writers and the abundance of materials thrown up by new spaces and historiographies are endless and not lost on Oladipo Agboluaje who, since his debut in 2003, has become one of the most profilic of the third generation of Black British playwrights referred to here. His plays, no less so the five in this volume, Early Morning, The Estate, The Christ of Coldharbour Lane, The Hounding of David Oluwale, and Iyale (The First Wife), can be grouped under a distinct category of postcolonial, postmodern writings on Nigerian-British diaspora experiences. The plays reveal distinguishing characteristics that have come to define Agboluaje’s dramaturgy. Among these are an over-arching concern for interrogating the impacts of macro conditions on individuals and sections of British society alike, in other words, using the microscopic as point and canvas from which to interrogate the forces and conditions that shape relations at all levels. His plays can be read and staged against many backdrops; they convey non-polemical, ideologically centrist but unmistakeably Nigerian-British perspectives on many subjects from twenty-first century postcolonial conditions to tensions surrounding dual heritages, cultural nationalism and radicalism, religious fundamentalism and diaspora concerns. His episodic storytelling style and plots derive from his dual cultural background and education in Nigeria and Britain. His characters and stage directions reveal anxieties about directors and performers misunderstanding his apolitical centrist stance or worse still, turning the spotlight from critical self-examination and individual responsibility to politics.
Since his first play, Early Morning (2003), Agboluaje has written over 30 literary pieces including stage and radio plays, short stories and films. His plays have been staged to full houses and with good reviews in Europe, Nigeria and the US. The plays in this volume vary in style and subject and reveal a stylistic development that started with experimentation in episodic structure in Early Morning to complex interplay of storytelling and presentational staging in The Estate and The Hounding of David Oluwale. Agboluaje’s defining dramatic features include combining subtle comedy and loquacious humour, flashbacks, archetypal and symbolic characterization, and minimal staging. His dramaturgy emphasizes the dialogic interplay of character and setting as politicized sites. His narratives reveal both an attention to detail and emphasis on physical vocabulary for rendering his colourful, complex characters and the social forces that shaped them. His settings are more than mere physical constructs; they are best presented as part of the semiotic fabric of characters and narratives. One of his strongest dramaturgical tools is to combine short, pacey rhythmic dialogues into well-made storylines. The desire for a strong storyline drives, to some extent, his use of storytelling techniques such as flashbacks, dramatized narrations and dream sequences. Storyline is employed more overtly as a dramatic facility is The Estate and The Hounding of David Oluwale and in the prequel, Iyale (The First Wife).
A FEW WORDS ON THE PLAYS IN THIS VOLUME
Early Morning is about three Nigeria-born office cleaners who question their decisions to leave better-paid jobs and lifestyles in Nigeria for menial jobs in the UK. The sudden realisation by the three office workers (Kola, Ojo, and Mama Paul) that their wild dreams about a Britain of unimaginable opportunities are wide of the mark generates a tense atmosphere of anger, bitter disappointment, bickering and uncomfortable self-examination. Early Morning satirises the seedy, underpaid underside of capitalism; it is unsympathetic with the characters’ claim that every black person in the UK workplace is an innocent victim of racism and discrimination. Agboluaje focuses instead on the illogical expectations of the characters, black and white. Far from implying that the conditions of modern-day migrants, the majority of whom live in Britain legally, are only marginally different from the experiences of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slaves and indentured labourers as one of the characters claims, the playwright uses the workers’ experiences to deconstruct cultural myopia and assumptions about the rights and wrongs of history. The simplest of his full-length plays, Early Morning is the start of Agboluaje’s experimentation with dramatic features that would grow in sophistication in later works. These include minimal staging, symbolic characterisation, critical self-examination, rejection of polemics, and play on humour and slapstick and the physicality of language. Other dramatic features are the interests in diaspora subjects and settings, identity crisis, characters caught in shifting diaspora subjectivities and quest for a ‘total’ theatre dialectic that celebrates theatrical syncretism and hybridity as shown in the integration of indigenous African and western performance conventions, such as African episodic structures and European plot devices.
The Estate is a vibrant, colourful play set in modern Nigeria in which a family gathers to honour the memory of their late patriarch, Chief Adeyemi. In the play Helen, former house-girl and now young widow of Chief Adeyemi plans a lavish public celebration