Staging Civic Resistance: Protest, Performance, and Political Intervention in Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead

Abstract

Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead occupies a central place within Nigerian protest theatre, mobilizing narrative, performance, and audience engagement to critique governance, social injustice, and civic apathy. While existing scholarship has predominantly approached the play through ideological, linguistic, and textual analysis, this study advances a performative reorientation by examining how Rotimi’s staging strategies including chorus, ritualized enactment, multilingual performance, and direct audience address function as mechanisms of civic resistance and political intervention. The study is guided by two complementary theoretical perspectives: performance studies and civic resistance theory, which together conceptualize theatre as an embodied, participatory practice capable of shaping political consciousness. Employing a qualitative methodology that combines close textual analysis with performance-oriented interpretation of dramaturgical structures, the study analyses how staging techniques generate civic meaning and audience engagement. The findings demonstrate that performance itself, rather than textual narrative alone, enacts civic resistance by transforming the theatrical space into a site of collective reflection and political critique. The study therefore highlights theatre’s capacity as a material, participatory, and politically consequential form of cultural intervention in postcolonial contexts.