‘Pateola’: Shakespeare's Play Takes Yoruba Form In the Hands of Adelakun Adeoye

On December 26, 2023, the National Theatre in Iganmu became the palace of Oriolowo for Pateola, Biola Adumati’s play about a kingdom forced to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the woman the gods have chosen to rule is the woman tradition says should not rule at all? By the time the production gets going, the question has already become bigger than Pateola herself.

Her father is dead, the throne is vacant, her brother Adeolu believes it should be his, and the palace is divided over whether divine instruction can really be allowed to overturn custom.

Director Adelakun Adeoye, assisted by Babatunde Lawal, understands that this is not a story that should play quietly on a stage. The production goes all out for the colour, movement and ceremony of Yoruba traditional theatre, and there is something immediately pleasurable about watching scenes like the palace come alive through its costumes, drums, rituals and large ensemble sequences.

Somewhere in the middle of the play, a masquerade figure tears across the stage in a whirl of ribbon and gold brocade. The people around him watch, some amused, some unsettled. It is a fitting image for a production in which celebration and danger are rarely very far apart.

The play takes its starting point from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, but what survives from that source is less the plot than the question of power. Here, the struggle is located inside a Yoruba kingdom. King Adebola names his daughter, Pateola, as his successor before his death, and Ifa subsequently confirms the choice. The problem is that confirmation does not settle anything. Some of the chiefs refuse to accept a female ruler, while Adeolu sees his sister’s elevation as the theft of his birthright. The gods have spoken. The men, apparently, are still negotiating.

Okeowo Faruq is particularly good at resisting the obvious version of Adeolu. He could easily have been played as an entitled prince furious that his sister has received what he wanted. Instead, Faruq gives him the conviction of a man who believes he is defending something larger than himself. His resentment is personal, but it is also ideological. He has been taught what a king is supposed to look like, and Pateola does not fit the picture. That makes his eventual turn towards violence more disturbing because it grows out of humiliation and wounded entitlement rather than arriving fully formed.

Ojo Damilola’s Pateola is strongest in the smaller moments. There is a tendency in stories about women breaking political barriers to make the heroine constantly aware of her symbolic importance. Damilola does not always play her that way. In one unforgettable scene, Pateola lies across a woven mat, reaching towards something offstage as she is injured. The grief is allowed to sit in the body. There is no need to force it into a larger performance. It is one of those tiny choices that makes the character feel less like the idea of a female ruler and more like a woman who has suddenly found herself carrying an enormous burden.

Adeoye’s direction is at its most effective when it uses the stage itself to make the politics visible. Raised woven platforms establish hierarchy, with the throne physically separating those who possess authority from those who are waiting for it. The palace is rarely static. Chiefs gather, women move through ritual, the ensemble fills the space, and the arrival of the masquerade changes the temperature of a scene without requiring much explanation.

The blocking is not always as great. Some of the palace scenes are arranged too squarely towards the audience, even when the real tension should be between the characters. There should be more moments of people watching one another, withholding a reaction, or standing just outside the centre of the action. The production has enough political intrigue to support that kind of staging, and occasionally one wishes it trusted the tension in the room a little more.

The lighting and visual design by Adetoye Champion Adeyemi gives the production much of its sense of occasion. The use of blue and violet around ritual and intimacy, warmer amber in the palace, and red around moments of danger creates a colour language that is easy to follow without becoming predictable. The strongest image comes when performers in blood-red cloth gather beneath a hand-painted crown resting on a skull and crossbones. It is an unusually blunt image, but it works because the production is not trying to disguise the violence beneath the ceremony. The crown is beautiful. The thing beneath it is not.

The LED backdrops are similarly ambitious, taking the audience from palace interiors to villages and forests. They give the production a scale that the physical set alone could not provide, although the transition between the digital images and the painted surfaces is not always seamless. The difference in colour temperature occasionally pulls attention away from the performers. It is a small technical distraction in an otherwise carefully considered visual world.

The live talking drum is more consistently effective. Played in full view, it becomes part of the action rather than simply accompanying it. During the more tense scenes, the rhythm seems to move with the actors. There is something satisfying about seeing the source of the sound, particularly in a production so invested in ritual and ceremony.

The costumes carry a similar weight. White aso oke and cowrie headdresses establish ritual and womanhood, striped agbada give the older men the visual authority of age and counsel, while the masquerade arrives in a deliberately unruly mixture of ribbon and metallic patchwork. It is one of the production’s cleverer visual choices because it can look festive and threatening almost simultaneously.

The supporting actors understand the heightened register of the material. This is not a production interested in naturalistic palace intrigue. The performances lean into folklore, prophecy, ritual and the larger-than-life quality of traditional theatre, and the ensemble is particularly effective when the production gathers everyone into its ceremonial scenes. The palace feels inhabited rather than merely decorated.

Where the production becomes less convincing is in its handling of Pateola after the initial conflict has been established. The argument for her right to rule is clear, perhaps too clear. She is chosen by her father, confirmed by Ifa and opposed largely because she is a woman. What is less developed is what kind of ruler she actually is. The play gives us the injustice of her situation more readily than it gives us her contradictions. A little more vanity, doubt, temper or political calculation would make her harder to idealise and therefore more interesting.

The production also occasionally stays too long with its strongest ideas. Some scenes could be tightened, particularly where music, movement and dialogue are all doing similar work at the same time. The spectacle is often attractive enough to keep watching, but attractiveness is not always the same thing as dramatic necessity. There are moments when the production would be stronger if it simply trusted the actors and moved on.

Still, what makes Pateola worth watching is the way its central conflict keeps returning in different forms. A woman is chosen to rule. A man believes the choice has diminished him. Chiefs invoke tradition. Ifa gives its answer. The women gather around Pateola. The palace celebrates and resists her at almost the same time. Even the crown becomes uncertain.

The production does not completely resolve the contradictions it raises, but perhaps that is where its most interesting material lies. Pateola is not simply fighting to sit on a throne. She is entering a political world in which everyone has already decided what a ruler should look like, and the real battle begins when the gods choose someone who does not fit that picture.

For all its visual ambition and occasional excess, Pateola understands that a throne is never just furniture. It is inheritance, authority, pride and, in this palace, a very dangerous thing to put on the head of a woman.