Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu—: Paraphrase in Performance

Femi Osofisan's play Women of Owu is a "re-reading" of Euripides's Women of Troy. Although the play was commissioned for a British production, Osofisan communicates with his compatriots as well. In order to reach both categories of spectators he works with two different semiotic systems. The systems function separately, but for spectators conversant with both systems, they enhance each other. The essay analyzes the 2004 London production and discusses the perception of some hypothetical groups of spectators and the skill with which Osofisan—and the director Chuck Mike—guided the interpretative strategies and so made it possible for the spectators, in spite of their different competences, to see the production as lashing out against mankind's habits of solving conflicts by means of war, be it in the European Athens of antiquity, in the nineteenth-century Yoruba Kingdom of Owu, or in present-day conflicts around the world.