New voices for Nigerian theatre and ethnic nationalities: A study of three NLNG award winning plays

Abstract

From the inception of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize for Literature (NLNGPL), specifically the drama category between 2004 and 2023, five plays, Yerima’s Hard Ground, Irobi’s Cemetery Road, Ukala’s Iredi War, Cole’s Embers, and Obari’s Grit have emerged as winners of the prize. The NLNG Advisory Board has established criteria or benchmarks for the selection of these winning entries. Arguably, such criteria, expectedly, would focus on the exceptional creativity of the playwrights in depicting cultural and traditional aesthetics of their immediate environment within its current socio-economic, political and global realities. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore the Nigeria Prize for Literature's selection benchmarks for its drama category to analyse three out of the five plays selected. It focuses on how the selected texts explore new trends in Nigeria's dramatic milieu and thus constitute an emergent dramatic tradition that perhaps defies ideological classification, rupture and previous dramaturgic patterns. It also examines their level of fidelity to the established traditions of playmaking in the country. It employs Edward Said’s Postcolonialism besides Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser’s Cultural Materialist theories in its analysis. Part of its findings is that the plays defy specific ideological pinning. The paper concludes that the plays have indeed set new trends in Nigerian theatre traditions