Old age is a relatively new area of critical inquiry in African literary
and, particularly, theatre studies. This paper aims to explore in what ways an
elderly Queen, Erelu Afin, in a 2016 University of Ibadan production of Femi
Osofisan’s Women of Owu is a subject of cultural and ideological debates that
disrupt, supposedly, normative understandings of old age, enabling one to reflect
on the assumptions embedded in gender discourse. Wisdom and experience are
often interlaced with life course and, ultimately, with elderhood in such ways that
a presumable absence of these factors opens up the role and status of an elderly
person to interrogation. The paper engages Stuart Hall’s understanding of identity
in order to reflect on the shifting potential of one’s identity when it comes to the
elderly Queen in particular and gender in general. Coupled with visual elements,
an exploration of speech enunciations, situations of interlocution and kinesic factors,
as they are performed in collation with other characters in the performance, will
allow me to explore the dynamism of gender identity as it correlates with old age in
a politically turbulent environment.