The “drama of existence”: sources and scope playwright, with a total of three plays,A Scourge of Hyacinths,From Zia
with LoveandThe Beatification of Area Boy, the first two of these titles being
in fact versions of the same text, one for the medium of radio and the
longer version for stage production. Juxtaposed against this broad profile
is the fact that the “middle period” of thes ands – the post-
Civil War, post-incarceration period of Soyinka’s career – saw the writing
and staging of satirical comedies and social dramas considerably more
ferocious, and much gloomier in mood than the plays of the earlier
period of Soyinka’s efflorescence as a dramatist. Indeed, the first play
of this post-incarceration period,Madmen and Specialists, marks a crucial
turning point in Soyinka’s dramaturgy; in language, characterization
and dramatic action, it seems to be Soyinka’s own “flower of evil” in its
frenetic literalization of the explosive and strategic anti-aesthetic which
the Nigerian dramatist had called for in the very first long interview that
he gave after his release from prison:...a book, if necessary, should be a hammer, a hand grenade which you detonate
under a stagnant way of looking at the world...we haven’t begun actually using
words to punch holes inside people...But let’s do our best to use words and
style, when we have the opportunity, to arrest the ears of normally complacent
people; we must make sure we explode something inside them which is a parallel
of the sordidness which they ignore outside.
Madmen and Specialistsoccupies a special place in the evolution of
Soyinka’s dramaturgy, not because the ferocious wit and bitter social
commentary which it deploys are without precedent in the plays of the
s ands, but for the important fact that it took these elements to
new directions by deploying them as mechanisms for extensive and de-
liberate de-formations of language, form and style. In subsequent plays
such asOpera Wonyosi,From Zia with LoveandThe Beatification of Area Boy,
Soyinka would attempt a reprise of this deliberate and artful linguis-
tic and formalistic implosion to depict and at the same time challenge
the deepening political crises in postcolonial Africa and the uncertainty,
fear and hardship that these crises imposed both on sensitive individuals
among the elites and the vast majority of entire populations. These latter
plays do not have the brilliance and power ofMadmen and Specialists,but
they are not unlike that play – and others likeJero’s MetamorphosisandA
Play of Giants– in upping the ante in Soyinka’s use of dramatic and the-
atrical experimentalism to respond to the waves of outrage perpetrated
by many of the continent’s rulers in the third and fourth decades of
the post-independence period in Africa. This particular artistic response