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Richard Hornby claims that the act of '[conscious] employment' of metatdramatic1 elements is a mark of a great playwright who 'conceives his mission to be one of altering the norms and standards by which his audience views the world, and is thus more likely to attack those norms frontally'.2 In other words, on the continuum between 'mild' to 'extreme disruption' in the degrees of metadramatic intensity, Osofisan's dramaturgy prefers the latter with an aim to '[invade] the audience' by hurling chaos, surprise, alarm' to an otherwise 'secure' environment.3 This paper aims to analyse the ways metatheatrical moments, which destabilise the reality of on-stage events and characters, are devised and incorporated in Osofisan's well-known play The Chattering and the Song (1976). The multilayered structure of the play employs various examples of metadrama containing inner performative situations, play-within-the-play, role play within the play, and dumb performances etc along with framing techniques that manipulate the reception levels of dramatic illusion for an audience. I have attempted to reveal how the playwright metatheatricalises his play by subverting the normative artistic and ideological trends in order to advance his revolutionary aesthetics.
Keywords: Osofisan, Metatheatricality, Illusion, Subversion
Introduction
Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan, famously known as Femi Osofisan, a prolific Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist and Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan was born in Erunwon village in the Western region of Nigeria in 1946. The fact that his writings reverberate with the dialectical moral strain can be directly associated with the effects of the politically charged environment of the era in which he started his dramatic career - a period when Nigeria suffered intermittent corrupt military regimes and experimented with political solutions leading to her second republic. What makes Osofisan's drama more aligned to the social and cultural sensibilities of his people is the subtle way he uses traditional performance praxis in order to create his own artistic markers to analyse the socio-political problems of his age. The abundant use of techniques such as episodic narratives, multiplicity of identities, role playing and themes such as the critique of authoritarianism and sensitivity to the rights and plights of the masses may be reminiscent of the Western political traditions of theatrical forms and ideology such as of Bertolt Brecht's, but in reality...