The “drama of existence”: sources and scope had to tailor his plays to the exigencies of the staging and production
context, whether at home in Nigeria, or abroad in exile.
The third and most current period has provided the leanest harvest of
plays in Soyinka’s career as a dramatist. And again, this seems traceable
less to a waning interest in the medium of drama than to the overdeter-
mining fact of an enforced near total absence from the theatre due to this
being the most intensely activist phase of Soyinka’s involvement in the
unfolding political crises of Nigeria and the African continent. Indeed,
it is symptomatic of this condition that the plays of this period are not
only the most intensely ideological and political of Soyinka’s plays, they
are also notable in being unambiguously partisan on the side of the dis-
enfranchised masses. The ambivalent solicitude of the plays of the two
earlier phases toward working class and d ́eclass ́e, lumpen characters, as
individuals and as a social group, is replaced in the three plays of this
phase –A Scourge of Hyacinths,From Zia with LoveandThe Beatification of
Area Boy– with a cautious faith in the ability of the urban poor and
disenfranchised to liberate themselves from their degraded, intolerable
conditions of existence.
Of course, this evolutionary profile only provides a limited interpretive
perspective on Soyinka’s drama. For the division of the work of major
playwrights with a substantial body of plays into phases, though useful
up to a point, is nonetheless qualified by its limitation in providing an
adequate critical purchase on the subtle continuities and consistencies
between the phases. This is as true of the drama of Soyinka as it is of
Ibsen, Brecht or Fugard. In this wise, perhaps the most impressive consis-
tency of Soyinka as a dramatist, no matter which “phase’ of his work we
choose to explore, is the fact that, at its best, his drama is an actors’ and
directors’ theatre. In other words, when his dramatic imagination seizes
on a thought, an event, a general social condition, or an intensely private
mystical experience, the resulting play – or act, or scene, or moment of
a play – provides a powerful technical vehicle for actors and directors
to exercise their art and craft. This is as true of relatively “minor” plays
likeThe Trials of Brother Jero,Jero’s Metamorphosis,The Swamp Dwellersand
The Strong Breedas it is of what Annemarie Heywood, in one of the most
insightful essays on the challenges to the staging of Soyinka’s plays, called
the “weighty” plays.These are dramas likeKongi’s Harvest,A Dance of the
Forests,The Road,Madmen and SpecialistsandDeath and the King’s Horseman.
And as these lists of “minor” and “major” plays show, Soyinka’s sure
sense of what works, what enlivens dramatic characterization, dialogue
or action cuts across the generic boundaries of comedy, tragedy, satire or