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ABSTRACT
Femi Osofisan's play Women of Owu is a "re-reading" of Euripides's Women of Troy. Although the play was commissioned for a British production, Osofisan communicates with his compatriots as well. In order to reach both categories of spectators he works with two different semiotic systems. The systems function separately, but for spectators conversant with both systems, they enhance each other. The essay analyzes the 2004 London production and discusses the perception of some hypothetical groups of spectators and the skill with which Osofisan-and the director Chuck Mike-guided the interpretative strategies and so made it possible for the spectators, in spite of their different competences, to see the production as lashing out against mankind's habits of solving conflicts by means of war, be it in the European Athens of antiquity, in the nineteenth-century Yoruba Kingdom of Owu, or in present-day conflicts around the world.
For many years Femi Osofisan has been extremely active in the theater, as a playwright and director as well as a scholar and teacher. He has created more than fifty plays; he continuously contributes to the scholarly debate; and he is a consistent critic of his society and his time. Only occasionally does the West have a chance to see his art on the stage. One such example is Osofisan's rewriting of Euripides's Women of Troy, or The Trojan Women, a rewriting that resulted in the production Women of Owu in London, in February 2004.
Osofisan had rewritten or reworked other dramas before, and he is careful to state clearly that he has done so.1 Obviously, it is important to him that his message be perceived in relation to an already existing drama. In most cases the aim of Osofisan's intertextuality is to oppose the rewritten drama, but there are also cases where he intensifies the message of the original drama. The London production likewise emphasizes intertextuality. Already the front page of the program announces "An African Interpretation of Euripides' Trojan Women," where "Trojan Women" is written in larger letters than "Women of Owu," which is the title of the production.2 In other words, it is emphasized that the work is a paraphrase and that one's understanding of it ought to be informed by Euripides's text.
Perceiving a performance as...