By Muyiwa Awodiya

Femi Osofisan marks his 80th birthday ceremony on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. May
God Almighty grant him long life in excellent health and prosperity. Osofisan is no doubt an internationally renowned playwright, scholar, poet, novelist, actor, director, songwriter and activist: A consummate man of the theatre.

He is a skilled playwright with a good sense of dramatic structure who has from The
Chattering and the Song (1976) to Ishara (2025), published more than three scores and 10
plays and he is still writing plays. Space will not permit us to list his published plays here.

The plays are structured to accommodate images, metaphors, songs and allusions that are already familiar with his audience. The dramatic structure of the plays make them accessible to, and popular with, the audience even when they carry philosophical messages.

The themes of better governance of the society, corruption, revolution, treachery, determination, self- reliance and perseverance, injustice and oppression, compassion and love fill all his plays.

Satire and humour are Osofisan’s forte in the theatre.

Against the daily threats of hunger, poverty, suffering and brutality and the tragic pathos of the environment, Osofisan’s capacity for laughter is ultimately the antidote which helps him and his audience to endure the scourges of inflation, deprivation and other economic hardships. All the plays advocate for better government in the society. Apart from being a playwright writing his own plays, he has also adapted some 10nplays from other writers and making them his own.

The plays are: Tegonni (an African Antigony) adapted from Sophocles in 2007; Women of Owu adapted from Euripides in 2006; Medaaye adapted from Euripides’ Medea in 2022; Midnight Hotel adapted from Feydeau in 1986; Who’s Afraid of Solarin? adapted from Gogol in 1978; Weeso, Hamlet adapted from William Shakespeare in 2012; The Engagement adapted from Chekhov in 2002; The Oriki of a Grasshopper adapted from Samuel Beckett in 1988; Another Raft adapted from J.P. Clark-Bekederemo in 2015; Ishara adapted from Wole Soyinka in 2025.

Osofisan is also a poet who has written several poems in journals under his real name
or using the pseudonym, Okinba Launko. It is under his pseudonym that he published a collection of poems Minted Coins that won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) poetry prize in 1987 and also won the Regional Commonwealth Poetry Award for First Collection in 1988. He has also published Dream-Seeker on Divining Chain (1993); Ire and Other Poems for Performance (1998); Pain Remembers, Love Rekindles (2000); Commemorations (or Ire Ni Temi) (2007); Seven Stations Up the Tray’s Way (2013); Remember Tenderness (2025); and The Jeweller of Night (2025). They were all published under the pseudonym Okinba Launko.
As a lucid prose stylist whose syntax and metaphors are quite simple and accessible to an average reader, Osofisan has written a well acclaimed novel, Kolera Kolej, numerous essays, short stories and novelettes, such as Maami, Cordelia, Wuraola Forever, and Abigail.

Osofisan is also an adept actor who has acted in several challenging plays including
the Nigerian premiere of Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists in 1971. He likewise
played roles in his own plays: as Mokan i n The Chattering and the Song in 1976 and as Hasan in Once Upon Four Robbers in 1978 and played various roles in The Oriki of a Grasshopper that toured various American States.

As a versatile actor, who has played many challenging roles in several plays, Osofisan has developed a vivid imagination and acute sensitivity. These attributes give him insight into role and character development in his plays.

Osofisan is an accomplished stage director who has staged many plays including the
premiere of most of his plays. He is a director who uses the production of his plays to
demonstrate the fact that a professional production need not necessarily be expensive and elaborate. He directed the world premiere of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels on the floor of the Assembly Hall, University of Benin in 1984, without the benefit of a proper stage, but by expert lighting, good acting and sensitive use of music and movement, he pulled off an excellent production.

In directing therefore, Osifisan utilises all the innovations of a director’s theatre-synthesis of production, ensemble acting, intensive rehearsals, stage discipline, historically accurate scenery and costume—to create realistic stage pictures. The need for a company that would keep a body of players together under an expert director long enough for them to develop the required acting skills for the production of his plays led Osofisan to form the Kakaun Sela Company in 1978. He is the Artistic Director of the semi-professional acting company and has often used the group to perform some of his plays in Nigeria and abroad.

Osofisan is one of Nigeria’s most committed and sensitive playwrights and skillful
play director. More than anything else, he is renowned for his restless quest for experimenting with styles and, even so, with bold assertiveness in his form and techniques in African drama. Osofisan’s revolutionary thrust and virtuosity in form and technique is
extraordinary; he dismantles and replenishes existing theatrical forms to create his own.

Osofisan shares with forms a spiritual bond which is unique and inimitable. The result has been an impressive repertoire in such timeless plays like The Chattering and the Song, Once Upon Four Robbers, Morountodun, Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, Midnight Hotel,
Aringindin and the Nightwatchmen, Another Raft and The Album of the Midnight Blackout.

Apart from being born a Yoruba, Osofisan has taken a deep and scholarly interest in
the culture of his people. His interest in the oral tradition and literature, ancient beliefs and the traditions of Yoruba runs deep.

This is strikingly illustrated by his frequent use of traditional motifs like Oral history, myth and legend in such plays as The Chattering and The Song and Morountodun. Oral narrative devices constitute the vehicles of plot and dramatic action in Once Upon Robbers and Farewell to a Cannibal Rage; While the Yoruba belief in divinities is exploited to portray Esu as god of compassion and justice in Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels and Orunmila as god of wisdom and guidance in Farewell to a Cannibal Rage.
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After giving a play a firm root in a particular locale, for instance, Osofisan then lends
it a Nigerian or African, or even a universal colour, so that each play has both a local
significance as well as universal relevance. Thus, in his use of Yoruba cultural materials,
Osofisan is never merely sentimental; rather, he creatively reinterprets his materials, giving them his own artistic significance and meaning.
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In conclusion, the objective of Osofisan, it seems, is the establishment of good
government and a well-ordered society in which the rights of the people and state authority are exposed in accord with the same high principles. With seriousness of purpose, Osofisan has worked diligently and adventurously to keep these issues in focus in all his plays. His achievement, however, has been the creation of a climate of awareness about the need for selfless leadership and good government that will cater for the people’s welfare. He often reminds the people of their sacred duty to protect themselves against the tendency of the state to trample upon their freedom and their right to have abundant life and good government.
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Awodiya, retired Professor of Theatre Arts and a foremost critic of Femi Osofisan’s drama, can be reached on 08037424915.