African Theatre: Companies (review)

African Theatre: Companies is the seventh volume in a series of yearly publications on African theater that includes essays, book reviews, obituaries, and a play. The volume offers a varied, refreshing view of theater companies from multiple perspectives.

The first two essays provide complementary histories on theater companies connected to universities in Nigeria. The first, by K. W. Dexter Lyndersay, is a memoir of the Unibadan Masques at the University of Ibadan from their first two years, 1974–1976, and the second by Foluke Ogunleye considers theater production at the University of Ile-Ife between 1967 and 1975 where celebrated playwright Ola Rotimi's early work received inaugural productions. A third essay considers a more recent theater company, the Jos Repertory Theatre (JRT), which started modestly in 1997 touring local schools with set text productions. Their first trip to Lagos gave the company new contacts leading to collaboration in 2004 with the British Council that included the development of a new script based on the history of Nigeria since 1960. The play, entitled Our House, opened in Jos, toured, the UK, and is the play included in this volume, providing additional insight into JRT's work and the nature of such a fruitful and productive partnership.

The remaining six essays (Eritrea, Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ghana, and South Africa) continue the remarkable and provocative contemporary history of theater making. As James Gibbs makes clear in his thoughtful introduction, "close scrutiny of how theatre companies operate is an important, often neglected, aspect of theatre life in Africa" (xiii). Thus, aspects of the essays include company structure and fiscal concerns.

The majority are first-hand accounts, such as Basil Jones's report on the origin and development of South Africa's celebrated Handspring Puppet Company. Jones, one of the four founding members, articulates "two essential ingredients" necessary for a healthy, active theater company: "continued artistic inspiration backed up by a firm and flexible funding" (94). Artistic inspiration, as this volume makes clear, is not an issue, but stable funding is. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discussions on Ghana. The diary account of his 2005 research trip to Accra by Michael Walling, from the UK's Border Crossing, details his mission to establish a link with theater artists for a joint production of Ama Ata Aidoo's play The Dilemma of a Ghost. The co-production's overriding purpose was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana's independence in conjunction with the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007. The collaboration's successful opening in Accra and its tour to Britain is a contrast to other theatrical celebrations in Ghana, at least in financial terms. The Ghana @ 50 Secretariat organized an ambitious program to produce a Ghanaian play every month to celebrate independence, but questions over budgets and venues plagued the organization early on, ending with the secretariat's abrupt closure, leaving many theater artists unpaid. The multiple microhistories of theater companies documented here provide a lucid and often riveting account of the eclectic, boundary-breaking work in African theater, including the numerous challenges particular to each.