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‘The Money Was Real Money’: Talking with Audiences about Corruption, Domestic Violence and Aesthetic Values during the Roverman Festival of Plays at the Ghana National Theatre1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2016

AWO MANA ASIEDU
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Abstract

This article is about audiences’ reactions to plays at the 2013–14 Roverman Festival of Plays at the Ghana National Theatre. Using a modified version of Willmar Sauter's ‘Theatre Talks’, questionnaires and participant observation, I sought to ascertain what audiences at this festival made of two of the plays presented to them: What's My Name? and The Day Dad Came. Audiences identified and discussed endemic corruption and domestic violence in ways that showed their keen engagement with and interpretation of the plays and their eagerness to take what was presented to them and make it their own. The discussion also reveals the audiences’ interest in the aesthetic qualities of the plays, which they shared in surprising detail. I argue that the personality of the director–playwright, Ebo Whyte, frames the audiences’ appreciation of the plays.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 151 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

NOTES

2 Interview with Ebow Whyte, the playwright–director of Roverman Productions, July 2009.

3 Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009Google Scholar), p. 22.

4 Freshwater, Helen, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar), p. 2.

5 Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London and New York: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar).

6 Kennedy, Dennis, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009Google Scholar), p. 3.

7 Ibid., p. 3.

8 Ibid., p. 11.

9 See Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, pp. 5–6, for a discussion of definitions of audience.

10 Sauter, Willmar, ‘Who Reacts When, How and upon What: From Audience Surveys to the Theatrical Event’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 12, 3 (2002) pp. 115–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here pp. 116–17.

11 Ibid., p. 118. Here he draws on ideas by Henri Schoenmakers.

12 See Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, pp. 11–38; Balme, Christopher, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 34–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Suleiman, Susan and Crossman, Inge, eds.,The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3–45Google Scholar, for discussions of the varied approaches to the study of audiences and reception.

13 See Sauter, Willmar, ed., New Directions in Audience Research, Advances in the Reception and Audience Research (Utrecht: Instituutvoor Theaterwetenschap 1988Google Scholar). See also Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000).

14 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 33.

15 Ibid., pp. 36–7.

16 Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and upon What’, p. 122.

17 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 33, refers to the work of Tulloch and Reason on ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre’, which revealed ‘the diversity of response to theatre events among audiences and provides insights into perspectives of an age group which is unrepresented among academics and professional reviewers’.

18 Roverman Productions, at www.rovermanproductions.com/global/mission.php, accessed 5 February 2014.

19 Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from Britain, in 1957, which started a wave of independence movements across the continent.

20 According to UHY International, ‘The fastest-growing economy in the world in 2011 (at 13%) was Ghana’, which also had a fast-growing middle class. See www.uhy.com/the-worlds-fastest-growing-middle-class, accessed 20 January 2016. A study by a British firm New World Wealth indicates that the capital city of Ghana, Accra, ‘will be the fastest growing African City for millionaires within the next five years’. See ‘Vibrant Accra’, Le Mag: Air Côte d'Ivoire Inflight Magazine, 17 (January/February 2016), pp. 26–32, here p. 31.

21 Several corruption scandals uncovered in recent years and reported in newspapers point to the millions of US dollars squandered and wasted by government officials. See Gifford, Paul, African Christianity: Its Public Role (London: Hurst and Company, 1998), pp. 5–8Google Scholar and 58–9, for a discussion of the fact of corruption in Africa generally and in Ghana in particular.

22 Botha, KarinViviers, Pierre-Andre and Slabbert, Elmarie, ‘What Really Matters to the Audience: Analysing the Key Factors Contributing to Arts Festival Ticket Purchases’, South African Theatre Journal, 26, 1 (March 2012), pp. 22–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 38.

23 Other theatre companies, such as Cozy Cozy and Theatre Mirrors, also produce plays with some consistency but have not achieved the same levels of national visibility and prominence as Roverman Productions.

24 Osofisan, Femi, Insidious Treasons: Drama in a Postcolonial State (Ibadan: OponIfa Readers, 2001Google Scholar), p. 87.

25 Asiedu, Awo Mana, ‘Making Use of the Stage in West Africa: The Role of Audiences in the Production of Efficacious Theatre’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 28, 3 (2008), pp. 223–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 224. See also Barber, Karin, The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000Google Scholar).

26 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 33, notes the value of ‘asking audience members what they make of the theatre they see’.

27 On some occasions there were few people who were previously known to me who joined in the discussions, and some participants were known to each other (for example there were some couples who came together, and in two instances, a mother and daughter/son), but the majority of participants were total strangers to me and to each other.

28 Both of these started before the quarterly theatre performances in 2008. Whyte's radio programme has been running since 1995 and was then called Roverman, becoming Food for Thought in 2005. The company started publishing the Rover Report Monthly in 2004.

29 Audience member A, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December 2013.

30 There were also a number of volunteers for whom this was a first experience of seeing a Roverman play. They also volunteered because they were impressed with their first experience.

31 Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and upon What’, p. 119.

32 This play was among the most frequently listed by respondents to the questionnaire as their favourite play by Roverman Productions. It was mentioned fifty-one times, representing 14.7 per cent of the total of plays mentioned as favourites.

33 See Yankah, Kwesi, ‘The Akan Trickster Cycle: Myth Or Folktale?’ (Indiana University, African Studies Program, Term Paper 1983Google Scholar), p. 13, available at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/125/Akan_Yankah.pdf?sequence=1; see also Donkor, David, ‘KodzidanMboguw: Supplanted Acts, Displaced Narratives, and the Social Logic of a Trickster in the “House of Stories”’, in Adams, Ann V. and Sutherland Addy, Esi, eds., The Legacy of Efua Sutherland: Pan-African Cultural Activism (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2007), pp. 38–46Google Scholar, for more on Ananse the trickster.

34 Audience member A, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December 2013. This is a Ghanaian version of ‘skeleton in the closet’.

35 Audience member B, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

36 Audience member C, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

37 See ‘Victoria Hammah recorded for 90 days’, New Statesman, www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Victoria-Hammah-recorded-for-90-days-291846, accessed 22 January 2016.

38 Audience member B, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

39 Audience member C, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

40 Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and upon What’, p. 125.

41 Audience member D, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December 2013. This contribution has been greatly edited for clarity.

42 Audience member D, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

43 Audience member E, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December, 2013.

44 Ghana Statistical Service, 2010 Population & Housing Census (Accra: Sakoa Press, May 2012).

45 Gifford, African Christianity, p. 110.

46 Ibid., pp. 5–8 and 58–9.

47 Audience member A, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014. The cedi is the Ghanaian currency. At the time of writing, there are approximately four cedis to the US dollar.

48 Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah, ‘Domestic Violence Bill Passed at Last’, Daily Graphic Online, 22 February 2007, at www.modernghana.com/news/124409/1/domestic-violence-bill-passed-at-last.html, accessed 12 February 2016.

49 Audience member B, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014.

50 There were other participants who had seen some plays more than once and said they would see them again if they were remounted.

51 Audience member C, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014.

52 All these features of Roverman productions put them in the category of popular theatre, closely akin to the erstwhile popular ‘concert party’ theatre tradition in Ghana. See Cole, Catherine, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001Google Scholar), for more on this genre of theatre.

53 Audience member D, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014. Here she went into details of how in other productions she had seen before, it was obvious that actors were miming drinking and using fake money, but apparently the Roverman productions had used real juice and money. It probably was theatre money, but it appeared to her as the real bank notes.

54 Audience member E, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014. All the plays are in English, which is the official language of Ghana. By ‘big English’ this participant was referring to complicated poetic language, which is sometimes used in some Ghanaian (mostly university-based) theatre, which may not be seen as popular art and more as ‘high art’. This is one main area in which Whyte's work differs from concert party theatre, which employed local languages; however, his use of English is down to earth and colloquial, making it easily accessible to his audiences.

55 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, p. 6.

56 Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and upon What’, p. 126. See also Sauter, The Theatrical Event, pp. 184–5.

57 Fiebach, Joachim, ‘Dimensions of Theatricality in Africa’, in Jeyifo, Biodun, ed., Modern African Drama (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), pp. 471–86Google Scholar, here p. 482.

58 See, for example, Soyinka, Wole, ‘From Ghetto to Garrison: A Chronic Case of Orisunitis’, in Research in African Literatures, 30, 4 (1999), pp. 6–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wolff, Janet, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

59 Awodiya, Muyiwa P., ed., Excursions in Drama and Literature: Interviews with Femi Osofisan (Ibadan: Kraft Books Ltd., 1993Google Scholar), p. 23.

60 Audience member B, Theatre Talks 2, 1 January 2014.

61 Audience member A, Theatre Talks 1, 29 December 2013.