Ola Rotimi is noted only for his plays, although he also wrote critical articles on Nigerian theater.

Ola Rotimi was one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s foremost dramatists, both a theatrical teacher and an entertainer as well as a playwright. Two of Rotimi’s plays, Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, are historical tragedies that recapture pivotal moments in the history of the Yoruba people and the glorious empire of Benin. Three other plays, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, If, and Hopes of the Living Dead, constitute a dramatic sociopolitical trilogy, an extended inquiry into the themes of struggle and integrity of leadership. In these plays, as in others, Rotimi warned his people to beware political charlatans who have continued to lead postindependence Nigeria to one poor harvest after another. A dominant subject of Rotimi’s plays was official and unofficial corruption on such a massive scale that the traditional African sense of community had been sacrificed to personal greed, personal power, and personal self-glorification. The Gods Are Not to Blame, first presented at the Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968, has as its theme that the real source of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) was mutual ethnic distrust among Nigerian people and not the work of the great political gods of the freshly decolonialized world, the United States and the former Soviet Union as well as France and England.

The Gods Are Not to Blame was awarded first prize in the African Arts/Arts d’Afrique playwriting contest in 1969. The politico-domestic comedy Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, written in 1965, when Rotimi was in his final year as a graduate student of playwriting and dramatic literature at Yale University, was honored as Yale Major Play of the Year. Both of these plays have seen numerous successful revivals in Europe and North America. The Gods Are Not to Blame has become a standard text for English literature classes in Nigeria, and Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again was a resounding triumph at its revival at the University of Toronto in June, 2000.

Rotimi’s plays are often filled with dance, mime, music, and song. Frequently, the songs or chants are in his native Yoruba. They offer thematic commentary on the actions of individual characters and on the destiny of the community. Like the words of the Greek chorus in the plays of Sophocles, the songs articulate the views of reason and social stability; at the same time, they are often humorous, frequently with a satiric intent. Rotimi merges the serious with the humorous in nearly all of his plays, for he believed that the dramatist must entertain as well as teach. Action in the Aristotelian sense is the essence of his drama. A distinctive characteristic of Rotimi’s work among that of contemporary African playwrights is the large number of characters, singers, and dancers on stage at one time. In his plays, the stage often becomes a meeting place for large crowds. Rotimi thus sought to re-create the spirit of communal participation that existed and still exists in traditional African ceremonies. However, Rotimi died before fulfilling his dream of producing a play with five hundred extras and characters.

Along with Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Rotimi belonged to the vibrant first generation of modern Nigerian dramatists writing in English. Throughout Nigeria, their plays are continually produced. In the late twentieth century, new dramatists, inspired by Rotimi and his contemporaries, emerged: Zulu Sofolo, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, and Samson Amali. Rotimi was one of the two or three most highly regarded dramatists in Africa and as such...