An acting edition — a working script printed cheaply in Ìbàdàn for performers rather than for readers, under the Orisun imprint that Ṣóyínká ran alongside the Orisun Theatre company. Books like this were made to be used, marked up and thrown away. Very few survive, which is why an unremarkable-looking pamphlet is one of the rarer objects in this collection.
The text opens straight into the cast: Eman a stranger, Sunma who is Jaguna’s daughter, Ifada an idiot, a girl, Jaguna, Oroge, attendant stalwarts and the villagers — and, from Eman’s past, an old man who is his father, Omae his betrothed, a tutor and a priest. The staging note is characteristically direct: the scenes are described briefly because a darkened stage with lit areas will usually suffice, and except at one indicated point there can be no break in the action, since a distracting scene change would be ruinous. That instruction is addressed to a company, not to a reading public.
Printed by the Abiodun Printing Works of Ìbàdàn — the same jobbing printer that produced Before the Blackout, the other Orisun edition held here. Both belong to the Ìbàdàn theatre world Ṣóyínká describes in Ìbàdàn: The Penkelemes Years, also in this collection, and to the same moment as the Mbari titles the Library holds separately.
Undated. No year of publication is printed anywhere in the copy. The only numerals are a printer’s docket, 6277/1765, at the foot of the imprint leaf. Nigerian jobbing printers of the period often encoded a job number and a month and year in such dockets, but that reading is a guess and should not be treated as a date. Its position in this collection is provisional.
