Staging resistance matters! Deconstructing structures of power and oppression in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

ABSTRACT

Situated on parallel cultural geographies of the global north and south, this study seeks to critically interpret Dario Fo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s theatre as representative of radical theatres of resistance and cultural intervention in their searing reinterpretation of Kenyan and Italian cultural discourse. Through staging narratives of systemic oppression and injustice, these dramatists salvage the history of the subaltern from the ruins of colonial and fascist regimes, thereby transforming their theatre into Marxist tools of counter-information. The concept of theatre as a form of anti-establishment political action and counter-discourse will be analyzed through The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970). Both plays are rooted in specific historical situations that are a part of the collective consciousness of the nation. However, through the use of revolutionary methods – humour, indigenous performance traditions, a critically-invested audience, the rejection of the traditional idea of empathy and catharsis, Fo, Wa Thiong’o and Mugo force spectators in the words of Nicholas Brown ‘to take seriously the possibility that art can be at war – in more than a metaphorical sense – with the state.’

KEYWORDS:

• Theatres of resistance
• revolutionary theatre and cultural intervention
• counter-information
• cultural education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natasha W. Vashisht

Natasha W Vashisht teaches under-graduate courses in Theatres of Resistance, Revolutionary humour in Postcolonial and European drama, and World Drama, in the Department of English and Drama, at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She has also been a Visiting Professor to the University of Toronto’s Theatre Erindale and to the Centre for South Asian Civilizations. She is a former Assistant Professor in the Department English at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She was awarded the prestigious UGC National Research fellowship for her doctoral research in European comic traditions as representative of culturally marginalized performance spaces, focused especially on the revolutionary theatre of Dario Fo. Natasha’s current research focusses on theatrical narratives from and of the Global South in an attempt to define the salient shifts in understandings of the Global South that have come about in wake of subaltern and postcolonial perspectives.