WOMEN OF OYU. To 27 March.

Tour

WOMEN OF OYU
by Femi Osofisan

Collective Artistes in association with UK Arts International and Chipping Norton Theatre Tour to 27 March 2004
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 February at Chipping Norton Theatre

Ancient Greece goes historical African and fits the relocation.Chipping Norton Theatre's introducing midweek morning screenings for mothers and babies, with breast-feeding OK throughout. The first film is Calendar Girls. The breast as maternal nourisher and as sexual allure. Then, there's the Theatre's co-produced Nigerian adaptation of Euripides' Women of Troy, with its first act ending of massed bare breasts as sock in the eye.

Set in 1821, it's less spectacular and technically acute than West Yorkshire Playhouse's recent Medea, but with a stronger human pulse. The simple setting a slightly raised walkway over a dry earth bank - is well-used. For men here mean trouble, and they come along this rampart to announce it. Posturing as gods or conquerors in elaborate costumes, they contrast the huddled, plainly dressed women.

They, in a play director Chuck Mike calls a lament', are the war-defeated, waiting to be carted off as prisoners and slaves. The word Yesterday', day of their defeat, is emphatically repeated as the play opens. A world's changed unimaginably.

There's bitterness too - Where were you? the women demand of their (male) god. Quiet intensity alternates with anxious, angry confusion, both quietness and intensity increased by soft percussive tapping behind the action a distant threat, or constant unease.

Their moment of physical defiance arises in this context; bare-breasted protest/curses being a tradition among African women. Military glory means human suffering, a repeating cycle: The battlefield only moves from place to place. War never ends. The Trojan War has moved continent and century but the pattern of brutality and suffering stays the same.

It's shown markedly in the second part through ironic comedy and deep tragedy. The baby heir's removal for execution, his return as a dead, still cloth-wrapped bundle, feels more powerful than any staged throat-slitting: knowing what will happen, waiting fearfully, bring the terror.

Then there's the African Helen, her comic seduction of her cuckolded husband, at first unsuccessful, humorously undercut by knowing sounds from the women, eventually announced, almost casually, as successful, produces deep, bitter irony. All this slaughter for men's desire and the cause of it goes home as if nothing had changed.

Anlugbua/Gesinde: Tunde Euba
Erelu Afin: Tosan Edremoda Ugbeye
Chorus Leader:/Lawumi: Louisa Eyo
Chorus Leader: Shola Benjiman
Orisayo: Medina Ajikawo
Adumaadan: Hazel Holder
Okunade: Rex Obano
Iyunloye: Funmi Olowe/Suzann Mclean
Young Woman of the Chorus/Percussion: Amie Buhari
Percussion: Ayo Thomas, Aliu Olatunji

Director: Chuck Mike
Designer: Atlanta Duffy
Lighting: Catriona Silver
Sound: Lee Stevens
Musical Director: Juwon Ogungbe
Choreographer: Aliu Olatunji
Assistant designer: Mandarava

2004-02-16 13:20:44