The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
Event in literature is experienced according to the scale of its
treatment.
Wole Soyinka,Myth, Literature and the African World
Drama in particular, no doubt because it is the most social of the
arts, provides the site in which this inherent menace is most strident.
In whatever country in black Africa that you open the curtain, you
will find that in the absence of genuine democracy, the life of drama
is lived on the edge of the cliff...The stark reality impresses itself
upon us: all dramatists with a conscience know that when they play,
they play dangerously.
Femi Osofisan, “Playing Dangerously”
Bad playwrights in every epoch fail to understand the enormous
efficacy of the transformations that take place before the spectators’
eyes. Theatre is change and not simple presentation of what exists;
it is becoming and not being.
Augusto Boal,Theatre of the Oppressed.Soyinka’s achievement in drama, relative to the other forms and genres
of literary expression, is a fascinating combination and synthesis of in-
dividual talent and sensibility, formal institutional training and practical
theatre experience, and the weight of received, subliminally absorbed
cultural tradition. His early work in the British theatre at a time of im-
portant aesthetic and political redirection in that theatre has been amply
documented, though not critically assessed.So has the influence of the
Western theatrical heritage on the Nigerian playwright, especially as
codified and transmitted in the works of canonical and non-canonical
figures and movements like Euripides and Aristophanes, Shakespeare
and Jacobean drama, Eugene O’Neill and Bertolt Brecht, the music hall
revue and agit-prop street theatre.But even though the specific African
influences on his drama have also been acknowledged, the sheer weight
of this influence has not received extended critical assessment.