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The dramatic devices in the play are, but not limited to, play-within-a-play, flashback, music, cinematic structure, ritual, and dramatic irony. This section shall focus on these dramatic devices and a few others in Cemetery Road.
Play-Within-a-Play
The play-within-a-play is a central dramatic device that Esiaba Irobi uses to explore the relationship between artistic representation, political education, and direct revolutionary action. This meta-theatrical device directly inserts the process of playmaking into the narrative. It is deployed in two major ways.
The first is the Kudingi Village Community Theatre Project. This manifests in the Second Cut of the play wherein Dr. Mazeli Anyanwu directs a production where the local peasants, beggars, and university students reenact their own real-life struggles. Under the cameras of the BBC, the characters act out the historical land seizures, the brutal military massacres in Bakalori, and their own subsequent arrests. This theatrical space allows characters like Amina to confront and articulate their real bodily trauma. It transforms their lived suffering into a collaborative, political performance designed to challenge the state.
The second manifests through classroom rehearsals. In the Sixth Cut and Ninth Cut, the audience witnesses Mazeli’s university drama lectures. During these scenes, the students perform a silent tableau of stock characters that caricatures the political reality of their nation. The tableau features an effigy of the President holding a cigar and a gun, surrounded by corrupt bodyguards, a businessman offering bribes, and a boot-licking academic polishing his boots. This meta-theatrical rehearsal is a satirical mirror of the state’s corruption. It shows us how theatre can be weaponised as a tool of intellectual subversion.
Flashback
The flashback is a crucial dramatic device used to break the chronological timeline of the present day. This device is explicitly used in the Fourth Cut, though it is triggered in the Third Cut when Mazeli and Somadina hear a Pentecostal hymn approaching their apartment. The hymn prompts Mazeli to recall the date June 6, 1966, the night his father was murdered in Kano City.
The stage directions then transport the audience back in time to 1966 when an eleven-year-old Mazeli runs out in his pyjamas at the sound of horses’ hooves and hostile voices. His father clutches the crucifix around his neck as he explains that rioters have burned down his church. The audience directly experiences the trauma of the father’s final, haunting words to his son before he is dragged off by white-robed horsemen to be slaughtered on his own altar.
This live flashback makes the foundational trauma of Mazeli’s life immediate and visceral. It provides the audience with the essential context needed to understand Mazeli’s stubbornness. His father’s parting demand for him to stand strong like a “bull at the shrine” and bear the blows of the butchers’ knives without a cry could, for example, possibly explain his fatalistic embrace of martyrdom.
Cinematic Structure
Cemetery Road does not adhere structurally to traditional, slow-paced theatrical divisions of acts and scenes. The play adopts a fluid cinematic structure instead in that it is divided into ten cuts. This framing mimics film editing with its characteristic fast-paced narrative jumps, quick cross-cutting, and sharp transitions.
This cinematic structure is reinforced by a few other things. The first is the jump cuts in space and time. The narrative rapidly cuts between vastly different and contrasting environments. For example, the end of the First Cut closes in the tense darkness of Mazeli’s apartment. Immediately following Somadina’s scream, the Second Cut opens with a sudden shift in space, lighting up the stage in blue light to reveal the BBC crew filming in the Sarki’s palace. Later cuts jump from the university classroom to the SSS torture chamber, and then to the posh Newcastle/London office of the BBC Controller.
The second is the use of lighting and sound as transitions. Irobi uses lighting cues and sound effects as theatrical equivalents of cinematic wipes and fades. Sudden blackouts (“LIGHTS”, “LIGHTS snap out”) are paired with blaring martial music, traditional dirges, or phone rings to signal immediate shifts in focus.
The third is the cross-cutting and split focus. The cinematic flow is highlighted during moments like the Seventh Cut, where the action splits between the physical torture of Mazeli in the SSS chamber and the SSS headquarters phone call, which is spot-lit on Lawani back in Mazeli’s apartment. This split-screen staging builds immense dramatic tension to drive the play towards its tragic climax.
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Music
Music in Cemetery Road is a foundational dramatic device that serves as an emotional magnifier, a vehicle for political resistance, and a structural transition between scenes. Esiaba Irobi combines traditional West African dirges, revolutionary anthems, and Western popular records to reflect the psychological states of the characters and the ideological conflicts of the play.
Traditional music, in particular, is used to mourn collective loss and foreshadow tragedy. The play begins with an “Opening Glee” featuring a funeral procession in which mourners carry a coffin and sing the threnodic dirge “Udu m akuwala” [p. 6]. In the Second Cut, the displaced blind beggars of Kudingi Village sing “Idanun mu sun dashe…” (“We are blind, as blind as the night”), using song to document their historical trauma, the seizure of their lands, and the military massacres they survived [p. 22-23]. In the Fifth Cut, the church congregation uses the Igbo chant “Anyi na-akwara Umu Saul Akwa…” [p. 61] and the parting threnody “Laa nudo…” to lament Mazeli’s stubborn path towards death [p. 62].
Similarly, popular African protest music is weaponised by the youth against the military state. During Mazeli’s arrest in the classroom, Fela Kuti’s legendary Afrobeat track “Zombie” begins to play [p. 85]. The students surround the armed soldiers, chanting the lyrics and mockingly performing ridiculous military drills to expose the unthinking, robotic nature of state violence [p. 85]. Similarly, the students march to 13 Cemetery Road chanting defiant war songs such as “We don come. Kpatakpata, we go die today” and “Iwe na-ewe anyi…” to signal their readiness for revolutionary action [p. 110].
In contrast to the traditional and revolutionary songs of the youth, modern Western records are associated with Lawani Turenchi’s capitulation to Western capitalism and moral escapism. Lawani uses Melissa Etheridge’s “All Over You” [p. 75] and Louis Armstrong’s “Blueberry Hills” [p. 92] during his encounters with Somadina. He uses these songs to seduce her and to drown out the harsh realities of the military dictatorship he serves.
Ritual
Ritual performance is used in the play to elevate material political conflicts to a cosmic and spiritual plane. Irobi employs both Christian and indigenous African ritual structures to dramatise generational divides and the execution of ancestral justice.
In the Fifth Cut, a stark generational clash over political responsibility is resolved through a solemn religious ritual [p. 62]. When Mazeli refuses his mother’s ultimatum to surrender the controversial BBC videotape, she performs a ritual of separation. She hands out lighted candles to her congregation and, as the choir sings the parting hymn “Laa nudo,” she extinguishes her own candle flame with her thumb and forefinger. This physical, symbolic act represents a permanent severing of maternal and communal ties, leaving Mazeli to walk his dark corridor alone [p. 62, 63].
The most powerful dramatic use of ritual, however, is Mazeli’s transformation into the medium of a sacred four-faced mask [p. 112]. Rehearsing in Kudingi Village, Mazeli prepares his final, desperate assassination plot as a sacred rite of passage rather than a secular crime. He brings out ritual components: yellow powder (odo), white chalk, an egg, and palm frond leaves [p. 113]. He kneels before the sacred mask while he chants “Igbaala egwu ike mbu, iya ahaha” and transitions the song to “Arikonko ogu abiala” to intensify the rhythm and summon ancestral strength.
Mazeli explains that the ritual mask represents a sacred spirit that cannot be commodified or filmed by Western media. He plans to wear the mask during a command performance for the President at the Nicon Neo Niga Hotel. The intent is to transform a theatrical illusion into a literal execution of justice by stabbing the tyrant “three times between the fourth and the fifth rib” [p. 114]. With this repurposed use of ritual masquerade, theatre ceases to be passive entertainment and becomes an active, spiritual weapon of political liberation.
Tableau
The tableau is used in the Sixth Cut as an effective satirical device to caricature the rot of the post-colonial Nigerian state [p. 76]. It is specifically presented as a silent, mimed dumbshow. Under Mazeli’s direction, the university drama students fill the classroom stage to freeze-frame the corrupt alliance between the military elite, local capitalists, foreign interests, and compromised intellectuals. The tableau is meticulously composed of several key symbolic figures that represent military dictatorship, capitalist alliance, co-opted intellectualism, and religious complicity.
At the center of the frame is an effigy of the President seated on a chair with a cigar in his mouth, a whole chicken in one hand, and a pistol in the other, surrounded by armed bodyguards. This image represents the crude, gluttonous, and violent nature of military rule. From both sides of the President, an obese businessman hands him money from a suitcase, while a European figure offers him Thomas Cooks travellers’ cheques. Their actions seemingly mirror the economic plundering of the nation by local elites and neocolonial financial actors.
Most damningly, the tableau features a crouching academic in sandals who tenders his curriculum vitae with one hand while using the other to polish the President’s black army boots. At his feet sits a portfolio emblazoned with the words “Future Ambassador”. This visual caricature indicts the academic class for selling out their intellectual integrity to curry favour with military dictators. Closely related to this is a chorus of Muslim worshippers “salaaming” and Christian worshippers carrying candles and a censer of incense kneel at the President’s feet. In them, we see very clearly how organised religion is used to legitimise and bless the corrupt state.
This silent tableau functions to a reasonable length as a micro-theatrical mirror of the entire play.
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Related:
- Plot Summary and Setting of Cemetery Road by Esiaba Irobi
- Themes in Cemetery Road by Esiaba Irobi
- Characters in Cemetery Road by Esiaba Irobi
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