London’s theatre scene has seen many performs mixing mythology with politics, however what Nigerian efficiency poet Taiwo Michael Oloyede creates in The Ghosts of Rainmakers at The Cockpit is masterful.
This emotional whirlwind unfolds like an epic story, drawing from Yoruba folklore to deal with collective fashionable guilt about destroying the setting, neglectfully dropping reminiscences, and abandoning non secular roots. The play is an act of cultural rescue and a problem to the viewers about their position in collective forgetfulness. The writing is sharp, letting historical past, ritual, and creativeness move collectively naturally.
From the second a cracked drum takes centre stage, the manufacturing proclaims its environmental and legendary nature. This drum serves as the guts of the play, a bodily image of the story’s concentrate on survival by brokenness.
The stage design succeeds by easy however significant selections. The lighting works much less to brighten the area and extra to inform the story: shadows stretch into warnings of the long run, rain seems by mild patterns that cowl the actors in flowing shapes. The sound design helps each beat and argument within the play’s predominant dialogue about ancestors and renewal. Visually, the design focuses on fundamental components: cracked earth spreads throughout the ground like veins, flickering lightning outlines the spirits as they collect, and a single calabash spills water that disappears earlier than hitting the bottom. All the things factors to loss, penalties, and issues that may’t be undone.
Kate Apaflo’s Ojonigbese is delivered with the conviction of a griot who has outlived her personal myths. Her efficiency is each testimonial and indictment, her physicality a measured vocabulary of weight and launch. Apaflo demonstrates the uncommon capability to carry pressure in stillness, a top quality that makes her pronouncements really feel carved within the air.
Fagbolahan Machado as Orogbeni brings an elemental pressure to the manufacturing. His work operates on two registers: a visceral bodily presence and a vocal timbre that means deep water, unhurried however unstoppable. He has the composure of somebody who understands that point itself is his collaborator. In distinction, Nisola Jegede’s Yewande is simple to the purpose of transcendence. Jegede’s financial system of motion is a dramaturgical selection that reconfigures the viewers’s tempo of trying; we’re pressured to attune ourselves to micro-gestures, to the subtlety of withheld info.
Oloyede as Kasali brings inner battle into the in any other case measured rhythm of the group. His tonal adjustments – sudden however managed – mirror the theme’s swing between taking motion and hesitating. The position calls for unpredictability with out chaos, and Oloyede delivers with cautious, nearly creative management Ileriayo Fadeni as Akanji provides the manufacturing its most advanced emotional vary. His comedy isn’t used to launch pressure however to bend it, displaying the skinny line between laughter and sorrow. His use of music as a structural thread offers the efficiency a rhythmic heartbeat, connecting completely different emotional states into one residing factor.
What struck me most was the viewers’s deep cleaning grief that left folks feeling lighter after going by it. Individuals held themselves, leaned ahead as if in search of forgiveness within the subsequent line, then sat again, shocked by the inevitability of what they’d simply seen. Crowd participation was engineered by a sluggish, nearly ritualised encroachment. The viewers finds itself implicated within the unfolding occasions as a result of the spatial and emotional structure of the efficiency dissolves the proscenium altogether. You realise, in some unspecified time in the future, that you’re not merely watching the ritual, you might be inside it.
If there’s one unifying success right here, it’s the solid’s restraint. This manufacturing understands the distinction between theatrical talent and theatrical displaying off. The actors show technical capability with out letting their performances develop into self-display. There’s a shared self-discipline and customary objective that stops any single efficiency from overshadowing the group imaginative and prescient.
The Rainmakers on this manufacturing are sharply examined. The ghosts function reminiscence gadgets, reminders of unfulfilled obligations and misremembered histories. The work’s political energy lies in refusing to let both character or viewers cover behind imprecise concepts.
As a cultural critic, I’ve seen productions wealthy in design however empty in spirit, and others wealthy in spirit however poor in craft. The Ghosts of Rainmakers is, fortunately, neither compromised nor extreme. Oloyede’s writing reveals the mark of a thoughts soaked in historical past, delusion, and a concrete sense of human longing.
Within the remaining picture, with the cracked drum nonetheless current and nonetheless resonating, the efficiency achieves a uncommon steadiness between ending and continuation. The stage empties, however the object stays: a leftover vitality supply the viewers carries out of the theatre.
This play succeeds as a result of it redefines stage expertise as a spot for group reckoning.
The Ghost of Rainmarkers will get a staging in Nigeria when Oloyede graces this yr’s Lagos Poetrython on Saturday sixth September 2025.