“Introducing Esiaba Irobi and Augusto Boal to Nigerian Pupils, Playwrights and Critics”

Abstract

This paper attempts to encapsulate the personality, artistic and stimulating playwriting skills of Esiaba Irobi, the 2010 Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) sole award winner, with Cemetery Road, prototypical of his dramatic oeuvres. The paper is aimed at introducing Irobi’s works, not widely known yet, to students of theatre and communication arts, theorists, theatre critics and those who must be interested, and need to be more educated on the positive change-orienting portents of drama and theatre as a most communicative art. The same is no less applicable to the theoretical and critical direction of August Boal, the iconic exponent of the theatre of the oppressed. The paper concludes with assertive advice on the need to be intimately acquainted with the theoretical and critical impetus, as contrasts to the well-known and more trafficed dramatic and critical terrains; of Aristotle and other masters.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 8(2), 140-152, 2011