Spectatorship and Critical Consciousness: How Nigerian Theatre Audiences Read Performance as Political Discourse

This dissertation investigates the relationship between spectatorship, critical consciousness, and political discourse in Nigerian theatre, developing an original theory of Nigerian theatrical spectatorship grounded in empirical audience research across five geopolitical zones. Audience studies in theatre research have generated substantial theoretical literature in Euro-American contexts, yet empirical research on Nigerian audiences, their interpretive frameworks, the cultural competencies they bring to performance, and the conditions under which performance generates critical political consciousness, remains almost entirely absent from the scholarly record. The research addresses this gap through a multi-sited reception study methodology involving post-performance surveys, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews with 240 audience members at diverse theatrical productions including political drama, traditional festival performance, and popular comedy across Lagos, Kano, Enugu, Jos, and Yenagoa. The dissertation develops an original theoretical framework of contextual spectatorship, which accounts for the multiple interpretive variables including ethnic identity, educational background, gender, and political affiliation that shape how Nigerian audiences read political meaning in performance. A central original contribution is the dissertation's empirical demonstration that Nigerian theatrical spectatorship is characterised by a high degree of active interpretive negotiation rather than passive reception. Keywords: spectatorship, Nigerian theatre audience, critical consciousness, political discourse, reception theory.