The Architecture of Trauma: Staging Historical Violence in Nigerian Theatre Across Five Decades (1970-2024)

This dissertation investigates the theatrical staging of historical violence across five decades of Nigerian drama, constructing a longitudinal analysis of how playwrights and directors have engaged with national historical trauma from the aftermath of the Civil War through the present moment. The relationship between theatre, trauma, and historical memory has been theorised extensively in Western performance studies but remains empirically and theoretically underdeveloped in the Nigerian context, despite the country's extraordinarily traumatic modern history. This research employs a genealogical methodology informed by trauma theory, postcolonial historiography, and dramatic analysis to examine forty plays and productions staged between 1970 and 2024, drawn from archives in Lagos, Enugu, Ibadan, and Kano. The dissertation maps a transforming archaeology of traumatic dramatic representation, tracing shifts from epic historical narration in the 1970s, through intimate personal testimony in the 1990s, to contemporary multimedia and fragmented dramatic structures that reflect the distributed and unsettled nature of national trauma memory. An original theoretical contribution is the dissertation's concept of traumatic dramaturgical accumulation, which accounts for the layering of historical violence in contemporary Nigerian performance. Keywords: historical trauma, Nigerian theatre, staged violence, dramatic memory, trauma theory.