Theatre Adaptations and the Nigerian Experience: An Examination of Osofisan’s Another Raft and Clark’s The Raft

By Isaac Attah Ogezi From time immemorial, artistes have always found the works of their fellow artistes dead or alive fascinating. This fascination sometimes can be so strong that such an artiste may not be able to resist the temptation to adapt such works with a view to imposing his vision on the works or to bring them to the tastes of his audience especially where the original works are of a different age or environment. The writer or playwright is not an exception in this kind of influence that is often translated to reworking an existing work. For the purpose of this discourse, adaptation1 can be viewed as making suitable of existing plays by playwright for new surroundings or audience for a greater appeal. In other words, audience relevance or bringing such plays to the tastes and experiences of the audience is of paramount importance in an adaptation. Theatre adaptations are not unique to Nigerian playwrights alone. Great world playwrights like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neil have used the plots and themes of other playwrights to much acclaim. On the home front, we have adaptations such as Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rites and Opera Wonyosi (a composite adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera and Brecht’s own adaptation of Gay, The Threepenny Opera), Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame, Wale Ogunyemi’s Everyman (based on the anonymous, ancient morality play of the same title) and Osofisan’s Who is Afraid of Solarin? (based on Gogol’s The Government Inspector but with the adapted title of Edward Albee’s play, Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to mention a few of the most prominent. However, in this work, Osofisan’s Another Raft shall be examined vis-à-vis J. P. Clark’s earlier play, The Raft, with a view to highlighting the successes or otherwise of the later work, the entertainment values, audience relevance, the imposition of the adapting playwright’s personal vision and adherence to aesthetic rules and principles of adaptation. The Compressionist Techniques in both Clark’s The Raft and Osofisan’s Another Raft: In Another Raft, Osofisan continues with the compressionist techniques adopted by J. P. Clark in The Raft to tell the story of a nation adrift on the sea of history right up to the era of military coups de’tat. It chronicles theatrically2 “the troubled situation of our newly-independent nation.” A nation which has experienced so many events since its independence enough to take it on the brink of sinking only to be miraculously kept afloat. After several decades, these storms have not abetted nor have the inmates been able to steer the ship of nation out of the fog. To avert this, the Ifa Priest, Orousi, is summoned and his verdict is that the ancient rites of collective cleansing must be revived. A carrier must be led down the Osa River, to the most ancient shrine of the Water Goddess, Yemosa, who is abandoned. This expedition is embarked upon by the Ifa Priest, Orousi, the old Priest of Yemosa, Omitoogun, who alone could locate the shrine, two boatmen, Waje and Oge, Lanusen, Prince of the palace, Chief Euroola, the Abore title-holder, principal Priest of Rituals, Reore, the reigning Farmer King, Gbebe and the carrier (Agunrin). Just like Clark’s The Raft, these nine characters aboard a raft experience a lot of sea mishaps, challenges and untold sufferings. First, the moorings are torn and the raft is adrift, with the paddles lost. Second, the endless bickerings amongst the inmates could not help matter, culminating in the death of the old Priest of Yemosa, Omitoogun, killed by his own son, Gbebe. Third, in the course of these inner rumblings, the carrier, Agunrin, throws his ritual gown to reveal a military officer’s uniform, and takes the raft adrift hostage. Fourth, the raft is wrenched into two by a tempest, with one part carrying off Prince Lanusen and Ekuroola. The chief boatman, Waje, and Agunrin dive into the water to rescue the duo only to be consumed along with them by the sharks, leaving only Orousi, Gbebe, Reore and Oge behind on the half-raft. Lastly, the guilt-ridden Gbebe who killed his father, sunk in despair, plunges down into the water to meet the same fate as the others, in the belly of sharks. In this confusion and uncertainty of a nation, the play ends in an optimistic note and with a clarion call that man must not resign his fate to the gods who “are a nuisance to man”3 but arise to take his fate in his hands. With these determination, insights and co-operation, the sunk raft is rowed back to the sea. In this adaptation, Osofisan has fully Nigerianized the original play to reflect the socio-political history of Nigeria, unlike Clark’s, though set in Nigeria with Nigerian characters, the thematic preoccupation is more universal, fixing man in a state that is beyond him, to which he cannot contend with without reliance on his fellow men. To the great drama critic, Martin Esslin, in The Raft, Clark attempts a very ambitious objective, with4 “the raft as an image of human life and man’s dependence on his fellow men and sheer chance – is very boldly and imaginatively pursued.” Osofisan, on the other hand, expands his focus beyond the fate of a single nation to the overall fate of the black world lost in the sea of history. As he put it into the mouth of his character, Gbebe5, “Each of you is a nation of Africa, each of you is the black race, each is the son of a shark, to be eaten by other sharks.” Earlier in the play, Gbebe laments that6: “… we are the only race of animals with an insatiable appetite for the children of our own flesh. Black men killing black, feeding on black. For ever and ever, black men always slaughtering other black men.” The military incursion into the political life of most African nations including Nigeria is well satirized when the supposed carrier, Agunrin, suddenly arises to intervene in the fracas amongst the civilian inmates, throwing his ritual gown to reveal a military officer’s uniform. We see how the politicians and the soldiers point accusing fingers at each other for the woes of the continent as aptly and philosophically stated by the character Gbebe7: “You’re a soldier. You accuse the politicians and the Chiefs of exploiting the people, and leading us to damnation. But what of you, sir? What else do you do except milk the land?” Osofisan’s Personal Vision of Optimism in Another Raft: One great area of divergence between Osofisan’s play and his elder compatriot’s is the former’s vision of optimism in place of the gloom of the latter. In The Raft, the tragedy of the two woodsmen left behind on the raft is complete and irredeemable and is captured in the two characters’ desperation and cry as follows8: KENGIBE: Shout, shout, Ibobo, let’s shout To the world – we woodsmen lost in the bush. IBOBO: We’re adrift, adrift and lost. Ee-ee-ee! KENGIBE: Shout, Ibobo, shout! The tragedy is so complete and irredeemable that the characters cannot even see each other because of the fog that has come upon them. It is indeed a pathetic end without any glimmer of hope nor any semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. Osofisan appears not to be pleased with such catastrophic ending and does not want to prophesy such a gloomy end for his country or any country in Africa, thence comes his happy ending in the usual character of tragi-comedies. The vision of optimism is well-captured by Oge when he encourages the others9: “Make we no surrender! De sea, we fit beat am! We fit fight de sea and win am! Come on!” Osofisan carries this vision further when he suggests the way out for a country like Nigeria, saddled with a multiplicity of ethnic groups and the concomitant leadership tussle. He tells the story of a king who had three sons all born on the same day, endowed with unique supernatural strengths reflective in their names: See-Far, Fly-Fast and Hear-At-Once. When the problem of which of them was to succeed their ailing father cropped up, the remaining three characters on the raft (Reore, Orousi and Oge) are unanimous that it must be all of them. In other words, Osofisan seems to advocate that the solution to Nigeria’s democracy is not the arrogation of power to one ethnic group or region but to all the ethnic groups or regions in a rather equitable sharing of power. This deviation from Clark’s irredeemable doom, forms the unique personal vision of Osofisan in this play. According to the scholar, Ahmed Yerima10: It is the playwright’s responsibility which allows the playwright impose a vision on old tales or original versions of plays … In adaptation, the theme is the first aspect of the play which the adapting playwright can infuse his own vision. The playwright adapting the play, must decide the extent to which he will infuse his own vision. He must decide the extent to which he is prepared to tamper or modify the original theme before actually starting to adapt. In this regard, Osofisan can be commended for compliance without dampening the entertainment value of his play. Yerima goes further to state that11: “… the primary function of adapting a play is to either update the entertainment values of the play, or to make the play more socially entertaining. Either way, entertainment is the main goal of the playwright.” Osofisan’s Multi-layered Language and Clark’s Free Verse: Writing on the timelessness and placelessness of Clark’s language in The Raft, Martin Esslin is of the view that this highly stylized free verse seems to militate against the playwright’s own intentions of presenting a realistic tragedy12: The question arises however: would it not have been more effective and easier for J. P. Clark to deal with his subject-matter in realistic, vernacular, prose terms? To me this certainly is true of his play The Raft which deals with the plight of four Nigerian lumbermen helplessly drifting to perdition downstream. This is tragedy, but it is realistic tragedy; much here depends on the differentiation between the townsman and the peasant, the old man and the younger generation. The free verse submerges rather than emphasizes these differentiations; it also detracts from the purely technical side of the tragedy, the men’s various attempts to salvage their craft. To deal with such a subject in verse would be justified only if the situation could be raised up to the level of an eternal poetic symbol. Thus the very fact that verse is used constitutes a programme of tremendous ambitiousness; and I don’t think that this particular play can live up to such a high ambition. It is therefore literally crushed under the load of its poetic objective. As a realistic play in realistic prose it would have been most gripping. But for such prose in the mouths of African working men there is no equivalent in English. These are the horns of the dilemma on which a playwright like J. P. Clark can be impaled. Perhaps aware of this weakness in Clark’s play, Osofisan deviated by treating his characters more individualized and fully motivated realistically by the use of multi-layered language. This has enabled his characters to use13 “different shades and idioms as spoken by different strata of that particular – and surely immensely important – segment of their society” in Another Raft. Oge speaks pidgin Nigerian English14 (“You know, Broda. Na shit. I save am from las’ night, just in case”), Gbebe, the philosopher-character, speaks refined English laced with flashes of poetry, the other characters speak in distinct English that reflects their individualism. This is a plus rather than a minus to Osofisan’s skill as a playwright in this adaptation. Writing on the use of language in adapting a play, Yerima posited15: Another principle which a playwright intending to adapt a play must consider is the act of perfecting his language and ideas. This is what enables him to impose his own vision on the original play. In establishing language and imagery in the new vision, the playwright is able to situate it within the social reality of his audience. Osofisan’s adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector of 1836 contains changes in the language and imagery to make it a Nigerian play… What Osofisan does is to replace the language with the everyday spoken language in Nigeria. Polycap, the houseboy of Chief Gbonmiaiye-Lobiojo speaks in pidgin English which does not only place him within a social class but brings the theme of the play closer home. The above assertion by Yerima is appropriate to the play under consideration. Osofisan, as a very conscious and skilful playwright, is fully aware that his audience is not only Africans but non-Africans and even when his subject-matter are not universal, he must exhibit supreme craftsmanship in construction and language to appeal to non-Africans as well. In a society where English is the language of the educated classes, the playwright, according to Esslin16, “concerned are faced with the task of evolving a new, truly African brand of English which will eventually be able to embody the emotions, customs, and daily life of the people concerned as efficiently and beautifully as West Indian English expresses the character of the people who use it in daily life as well as in literature.” In this aspect, Osofisan has indeed succeeded. Osofisan and Brechtian Aesthetics: An avowed Marxist writer, Osofisan employed Brechtian aesthetics to impose his radical vision in this play. The brilliant use of alienation effect in the three-actor chorus is aimed at suspending the audience’s belief as is typical of Brecht’s plays. From the opening two scenes, which are like a prologue to the play, Osofisan tries to alienate his audience by forewarning them not to be too involved in the actions on the stage as the entire exercise is theatre, a make-believe world. Yemosa Three warns that17 “Just like on any of our ancient moonlit nights at the story-teller’s feet, all we do here is an open lie, a known and visible fairy-tale, well-known, and it is only your imagination that will colour it.” Agreeing, Yemosa One adds18: “Nothing you see will be real, or pretend to be. Nothing you hear will be true. All is fiction, the story is false, the characters do not exist. We are in a theatre, as you well know, and we see no need to hide it.” One great advantage of this technique in Osofisan’s dramaturgy is that it allows for simple scenery and swift movements on the stage without having to provide19 “a well-decorated room, reeking with grandeur and luxury, peopled by beautiful damsels and colourful heroes, with whom you are singularly privileged to mix, even if briefly, for the price of a ticket …” This technique is very popular in Marxist theatre and holds whatever the bourgeois class values highly with open disdain. To Marxist dramatists, the theatre has ceased to be an avenue for entertainment simpliciter, but a place to conscientize the proletarian class with a view to taking up arms. Osofisan had this in mind when he consciously brought together characters from all strata of the society – Lanusen, a prince of the palace, Chief Ekuroola, a successful Lagos tycoon and the Abore, Omitoogun, the old Priest of Yemosa, on the one hand and the two boatmen, Reore, the reigning Farmer King, and Agunrin, the carrier, on the other. Even right from the outset, the playwright deliberately warns us of this class struggle to expect in the stage direction of scene three as follows20: Lights bleed back slowly onto the state [sic] outlining the silhouettes of the raft and the figures on it … Their positions on the raft are defined, we will see later, by their class status, with PRINCE LANUSEN and the other chiefs together to one side; OMITOOGUN and his son Gbebe and Reore on another; the boatmen’s position somewhere else; and finally the sacrifice, bound down, the back to us, farthest away from the side of the audience. The bourgeois class, as we see later in the play, is to pay the price for this when the carrier (sacrifice), Agunrin, stages a military take-over of the raft and the rest is the dictatorship of the proletariat when the revolution succeeds as described in the stage direction of scene five21: “OROUSI, LANUSEN, and EKUROOLA are on one side, stripped to the waist, bound back-to-back, while AGUNRIN, a gun conspicuous in his hand, and also stripped, walks slowly round them.” Osofisan depicts a fearful society that is brooding on time-bomb because of class tensions and conflicts occasioned by injustice, poverty, exploitation, intrigues, religious hypocrisy and class segregation. Agunrin, who champions the cause of the poor in the play, calls the chiefs sharks and parasites22: “Sharks! They’re nothing but sharks!”; 23“And how shall we achieve it, if we carry our parasites back to town?” To Marxist dramatists, the definition of religion as the opium of the people by which the rich use to oppress and suppress the ignorant poor cannot be farther than the truth. Little wonder that no Marxist theatre is complete without poking fun at religion generally. In this play as in most of his plays, Osofisan is not an exemption as he openly celebrates the death of the gods. The gods are demystified, stripped naked in the market-places before the public glares. They do not exist but in the minds of the people as Osofisan put it in the mouths of his goddess-characters Yemosa Three and Two24: Gods and goddesses breed in the minds of men as hyacinths in fertile water And when we flower, we embellish the landscape of your imagining so colourfully, that men invest us with all kinds of extraordinary powers. Osofisan’s derogatory world-view about the myth of gods and goddesses has never received so great an expression like in this play. He sees man and god as one and the same thing,25 “We’re you, and you’re us”, says Yemosa One. According to the playwright, we can make or unmake our destiny as human beings and not owing to any gods or goddesses or the stars! Reore celebrates the death of the gods when he exclaims26: “There’s no goddess but our muscles! The strength of our forces combined.” However, despite the ambitiousness of Osofisan in this play, the ending is rather forced. His attempt to pierce the gloom in Clark’s The Raft with some rays of his vision of optimism culminate in dues ex machina, thus robbing the play of a realistic ending. On the seventh day of the expedition on the sea with only three characters left out of the nine that set out, the raft adrift is practically a wreck of logs that27 “knock together on the water”, to show how loose they are. Orousi, Oge and Reore (the three characters left on the raft) try to push it with all their might to turn the raft from a whirlpool, the famous current of Olobiripo28, “the dancing pool which has sucked down countless ships, including even the whiteman’s.” When it appears the raft will not turn by their lame efforts against the current, and they are going to drift past the town of Aiyepe or be swallowed in the whirlpool, suddenly the sea-sprites re-appear and they are saved! This is a pure case of dues ex machina! In fact, the playwright did not stop at that improbability, the three human characters are even made to solve the riddle of the sea-sprites which they did not know the details of! Another obvious snag in this play is the unnecessary reference to Clark’s play by Yemosa One in scene two29: “In 1964, the Nigerian playwright, J. P. Clark, now known as Clark-Bekederemo, wrote his play, The Raft, which came to symbolize the troubled situation of our newly-independent country …” This is uncalled-for and rather obsequious in an adaptation. Or was Osofisan afraid of a legal action on copyright violations by Clark? Or perhaps that was the agreement reached between him and his elder compatriot? The above apparent weaknesses notwithstanding, Osofisan is successful in what he sought out to do in this play. He has been able to chronicle the storms that have ceased to abet in our nation since Clark wrote The Raft in 1964. Even when all is not yet Uhuru, Osofisan seems to be saying like a seer that the pitch-dark, long night shall not long be victorious, but shall break into a new day by the pinpricks of dawn in the eastern horizon! Conclusion: From the foregoing, it is obvious that theatre adaptations are not alien to the Nigerian literary landscape. Our playwrights have not only adapted works of writers of different centuries and continents but have also looked inwards to works of their compatriots with a view to updating their entertainment values, social relevance and immediacy. This is what Osofisan has remarkably done with Clark’s The Raft in his adaptation, Another Raft. He has completely radicalized the theme of Clark’s, to show us a nation adrift. This is what he has also done to Wole Soyinka’s Isara: a Voyage Around Essay under the title, A New Dawn at Isara, to bring to the stage what not a few readers consider a rather complex autobiographical novel. Endnotes: 1. Yerima, Ahmed, Basic Techniques in Playwriting (Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited, 2003), p. 119. 2. Osofisan, Femi, Another Raft (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 1989?), p. 5. 3. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 84. 4. Esslin, Martin, “Two Nigerian Playwrights” in Introduction to African Literature, edited by Ulli Beier (Ibadan: Longman Group Limited, 1967), p. 260. 5. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 69. 6. Op. cit., p. 54. 7. Op. cit., p. 63. 8. Clark, J. P., The Raft in Three Plays (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 133. 9. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 82. 10. Yerima, op. cit., pp. 122 and 124. 11. Ibid., p. 122. 12. Esslin, op. cit., p. 257. 13. Ibid. 14. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 41. 15. Yerima, op. cit., pp. 127 and 128. 16. Esslin, op. cit., p. 258. 17. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 3. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Op. cit., p. 7. 21. Op. cit., p. 40. 22. Op. cit., p. 46. 23. Ibid. 24. Op. cit., p 83. 25. Op. cit., p. 84. 26. Op. cit., p. 85. 27. Op. cit., p. 75. 28. Op. cit., p. 78. 29. Op. cit., p. 5.