Wesoo, Hamlet! or, The Resurrection of Hamlet

by Femi Osofisan

Femi Osofisan adapts Shakespeare's Hamlet, setting it in late 20th century Yorubaland. Osofisan combines the broad contours of Shakespeare's plot with his distinctive style, including Yoruba songs, rituals, and performances, as well as the metatheatric intervention of Hamlet, Ophelia, and Claudius in the Yoruba story line.

Genres: Drama

92 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2012

About the author

Femi Osofisan studied in Ibadan, Dakar and Paris and taught theatre and comparative literature at the University of Ibadan for 34 years, a post from which he recently retired.
Osofisan’s professional experience is manifold—he is an award-winning poet, writer, actor, company director, journalist and scholar. But it is as playwright that he established his reputation, having written and produced over fifty plays, roughly half of which have been published.
Among these are a series of plays which speak of Osofisan’s long-standing interest in reinterpreting European works in the context of African—specifically, Yoruba—traditions and customs. He approaches his continuous search for a viable modern written theatre that would still be authentically African not only in terms of shared thematic concerns but, more importantly, with a view to form and technique.
He has worked on several canonical texts—including Shakespeare, Chekov, Gogol, Brecht, Feydeau, Frisch, and Sophocles—and discussed in his essays the consequences of this interweaving of cultures aimed at producing a new synthesis. What comes out of the commingling of Soyinka and Brecht or Grotowski, Clark and Ogunde with Barrault, Rotimi with Mnouchekine and so on, particularly against the backdrop of our traditional performance aesthetics? How can all these elements be pressed into the service of a ‘committed theatre’ in the age of globalized neo-colonialism and increasingly globalized terrorism on the one hand and of ‘Nollywood’ and proliferating Pentecostal movements on the other?

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best Hamlet adaptations I've read. Osofisan is a master of adaptation, taking compelling source plays and taking them in really unique directions. This play actually reminds me a lot of Tegonni, Osofisan's treatment of the Antigone story. Here Osofisan takes a source text--Hamlet--and filters it through Yoruba culture, ritual, and performance, but he also makes it relevant to contemporary Nigerian political economic issues. In this case, Osofisan takes on economic (neo)colonialism through Western businesses setting up shop in African nations and using local African middlemen to establish factories, mines, etc. which bring some economic benefits to the communities, but also bring major health, environmental, cultural, and communal problems. However, the middlemen who set up the factories become fabulously wealthy and gain political power through their money, so this becomes a form of proxy colonialism through which the global north asserts it power through economic middlemen.

The really interesting thing about this play as an adaptation (because strictly speaking, the politico-economic commentary above doesn't depend on Hamlet or adaptation) is that it deepens the question of colonialism and self-determination, because the adapted text represents a kind of tyrannical shadow over the Yoruba characters, who struggle to avoid the seemingly inevitable events of Hamlet.
https://youtu.be/FoYKiz53xTc

[Omobolanle]

What is the critical analysis of this play

[mengwe · Rating 4 out of 5]

***4.5 stars