ABSTRACT

The joy of every play director is to see that his audience is appreciative and well-receptive of his directed plays and would want to patronize the live theatre again and again; such was the production of Bakare Ojo-Rasaki 's Drums of War. The production was laden with aesthetic effects which are believed to have been the major alluring factor in engineering audience patronage. Therefore. this research work takes a deep insightful look into the problem of the dee!ine in five theatre patronage in Nigeria with a view to solving it using play directing as a useful approach. The need to incite the audience to go back to the theatre-going tradition arises as a result of the large number of theatre graduates being churned out year after year with minimal job opportunities. Therefore to tackle this sickening trend, this research work proposes embellishment of play productions with aesthetic effects that can allure audience to the theatre for play productions .