Examine the role of chorus in advancing the plot.
In Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, an adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women, the chorus of Owu women is the spine of the play's structure. Borrowing the classical Greek convention and grafting it onto a Yoruba setting, Osofisan uses the chorus to carry information, bridge the episodes, voice the collective suffering of the conquered and drive the action toward its resolution. Made up of the ordinary women who survived the sacking of the city and now share in its aftermath of grief, the chorus advances the plot in the following ways.
1. It narrates background and present events. Because most of the destruction of Owu has already happened before the play opens, the chorus carries the essential exposition. It recalls the greatness of Owu, the long siege by the Allied Forces of Ijebu, Ife and Oyo, and the causes and course of the war, while also reporting the current calamities unfolding around the captive women. Without this narration the fragmentary, episodic action would be unintelligible; the chorus supplies the continuity that moves the story forward.
2. It appeals to the gods and shapes the play's direction. Early in the play the chorus pleads with Anlugbua, the ancestral father of Owu, to intervene on the city's behalf. When Anlugbua refuses, the chorus leader turns the despair into resolve, admonishing the women to summon courage to face what lies ahead, insisting that "it's us, not the gods, who create the war. It's us human beings who can kill it." This shift from supplication to grim endurance sets the emotional trajectory of the whole plot and prepares the women, and Erelu especially, to face the worst.
3. It links and bridges the successive episodes. The play proceeds through a chain of encounters as the women, chiefly Erelu, Orisaye and Adumaadan, are led one by one toward their fates. Between these scenes the chorus intervenes with lament, warning and commentary, connecting one episode to the next and giving the loosely episodic structure momentum. It empathises with Erelu over the calamities that have befallen her, particularly the madness overtaking Orisaye, and cautions her to take care not to hurt herself.
4. It voices the collective grief of the victims. The chorus embodies the widowed and captive women of Owu, so that the tragedy is not a series of private sorrows but the anguish of a whole people. When Adumaadan surrenders her only son Aderogun to Gesinde to be killed, the chorus mourns with her; when the boy's corpse is brought for burial they dance round his body and apologise "for bringing you to the world and having to send you away so early and so harshly." Through such shared lamentation the plot registers the full human cost of conquest.
5. It warns, admonishes and mediates. The chorus repeatedly steers the conduct of the other characters. It warns Erelu to prepare for the worst, yet also cautions her against speaking evil of the gods even in the depth of her grief. It curses the Allied Forces for their cruelty, one voice crying, "May you all without exception suffer the indignity of unremembered graves," while urging the surviving people to keep hope alive. In this way it functions as the moral conscience that guides the movement of the action.
6. It acts as custodian of tradition and completes the ritual action. As keepers of the culture of Owu, the chorus reminds Erelu of the rites of passage now thrust upon her, since all the priests and princes have been killed and the dead need someone to release their spirits to the ancestors. Toward the close, the chorus invokes Anlugbua once more, pleading forgiveness for the living and safe passage for the dead. Through them Anlugbua promises that Owu will rise again, not as a single city but scattered in little communities within the other towns of Yorubaland. This prophecy resolves the plot, turning total defeat into the seed of survival.
7. It carries the play's universal, anti-war message. Speaking beyond nineteenth-century Owu, the chorus generalises the horror of war, linking the fall of the city to all wars of conquest and voicing Osofisan's warning to the powerful of every age. This choral commentary shapes the audience's response and gives the plot its enduring moral weight.
Conclusion. The chorus advances the plot of Women of Owu by narrating the background, appealing to and interpreting the will of the gods, bridging the episodes, voicing the collective grief of the victims, warning and mediating among the characters, performing the ritual duties of the dead and delivering the play's universal message. It is therefore indispensable to both the structure and the meaning of the play, functioning at once as narrator, mourner, conscience and prophet of Owu.
