The document provides a review of a performance of Femi Osofisan's play "The Chattering and the Song". It summarizes the plot, which involves a love triangle between three characters that results in one character faking a treason arrest of the other two during their wedding. It notes that Osofisan uses this plot device to subtly introduce themes of social injustice and the need for political and economic change. The review praises how the performance brought these themes to life through music, dance, costumes and vivid dialogue and actions, though notes the themes are somewhat subtle in the original text. It concludes that while the play anticipates greater sovereignty for the masses, it offers a hopeful vision of change without disfiguring the artistic

1. Dr Kemi Atanda ILORI
Behind the Gloss - A Review of the Performance of Femi Osofisan’s The Chattering
and the Song P a g e 1 | 2
Behind the Gloss of Femi Ososfisan’s Chattering Society
A Review of the Performance of Femi Osofisan’s play, The Chattering and the Song
First published in The African Guardian, October 15, 1987.
Kemi Atanda Ilori
The benchmark of Femi Osofisan’s drama is its highly intellectual content and its blatant
Marxist ambience. Despite its distinctive nature, this is, perhaps, not the most important
quality of Osofisan’s drama, or in any case, of specially his play The Chattering and the
Song performed by Gangan Productions under the direction of Ayo Oluwasanmi.
The mainspring of action in Chattering is the triad of love-hate-revenge. This is an old
motif that here in Nigeria has been dissipated by mostly the travelling theatres and
some popular television series. But Osofisan’s use of the motif is startling, especially in
its subsumption in a playlet on a moment of history in the ancient Oyo Empire. For
clarifications, Mokan (Ali Balogun) and Yajin (Sosan) had been in love, but Yajin
dropped Mokan and met a new flame in his classmate and friend Sontri (Mabiaku). On
the surface, Mokan sucked in this bad turn in good faith, concealing his bitterness till the
eve of the couple’s wedding. To add some excitement to their wedding, Sontri and Yajin
proposed a historical drama evidently critical of the status-quo. At the decisive moment,
Mokan halts the play, reveals himself as a secret agent of government and arrests the
performers including Sontri and Yajin on charges of treason.
To be succinct, the playwright’s motive is obvious as much in the dramatic triad as in
the historical playlet. Using the triad as a veil, Osofisan sneaks in, adroitly, the issue of
social injustice and inhumanity in a political system whose basis is the bulwark of
material exploitation of society by the rich and the powerful. Alienated by this system
Sontri and his friend Leje (Mofe-Damijo) chose the secretive Farmer’s Movement to plot
its overthrow and consequent transcendence by a more humane, democratic and
egalitarian structure. In text, much of this choice is cerebral, glossed in an overtly poetic
mediation.
The performance is a different event altogether. The episodic structure of the play
unifies the triad and the playlet. Music, dance, songs, and even riddles, merge with
dramatic action as an index of meaning, time and locale. Often the humor of Chattering
as much as its pathos are nuances from the bio-history of the characters, their social
status and vision. These characters are overtly earthy and at times vulgar, yet still
affable in their eccentricities, their intrigues and mischiefs.
In summary much of the mystery of the text dissolves on stage in the visual details of
costume and set, the momentousness of dialogue and action, the babbling rhythm of
traditional drums. They conceal such instances where Osofisan’s story not only sags
but appears far too slight for a lesson on the implications of an inhuman social order
and the urgency of social revolution, notwithstanding the violence or bloodletting that
may attend it.

2. Dr Kemi Atanda ILORI
Behind the Gloss - A Review of the Performance of Femi Osofisan’s The Chattering
and the Song P a g e 2 | 2
Clearly, it is far still for the sovereignty of the masses but a hopeful theatre like
Chattering, behind its poetic gloss, does anticipate it and, what is more, speculate on its
necessity and possibilities in a way that neither disfigures nor disheartens our artistic
experience.
Kemi Atanda Ilori