The “drama of existence”: sources and scope tyrants, charlatans and hypocrites of Soyinka’s more ferocious satires,
Lakunle seems to come from another dramatic imagination. Moreover,
The Lion and the Jewelis the only one of Soyinka’s plays to end with an
unambiguously happy resolution. The very last stage direction in the
play informs us that having been outmaneuvered by the wily Baroka,
the “lion” of the title of the play, in the competition for Sidi the “jewel”
of the village, Lakunle is seen rallying to the irrepressible impulses of
youth and sexuality as he dances after one of the young maidens in Sidi’s
bridal party.
The plot of the play involves a deliberate inversion of one of the most
constant motifs of romantic comedy: a love triangle in which the romance
of a pair of young lovers is for a while thwarted and frustrated by an older,
often wealthier suitor; but the younger suitor ultimately prevails and the
young lovers marry. In this play, it is the older suitor, Baroka, whose suit
prevails and who shows far greater vitality and resourcefulness than his
young, hapless competitor. This inversion, in which age prevails over
youth, entails other important details as well: the “illiterate” protagonist
proves more astute and enterprising than his bookish antagonist; the
“backward” villager proves more cultured, more enlightened than the
citified, would-be sophisticate.
Soyinka has given an account of the origins of this play that shows
how his direct observation of life and its surprises provided a basis for
the play’s inversion of conventional comic motifs:
I wrote the first draft ofThe Lion and the Jeweltowards the end of my student days in
England. It was actually inspired by an item which said: “Charlie Chaplin...a
man of nearly sixty has taken to wife Oona O’Neil,” who was then about
seventeen, something like that. Now no one readingThe Lion and the Jewelwould
ever have imagined that this is the authentic genesis of the play from Charlie
Chaplin, and again thinking of the old men I knew in my society who at-
plus,, would still take some new young wives – and always seemed perfectly
capable of coping with the onerous tasks which such activity demanded of them!
I just sat down and that’s how Baroka came into existence. I knew that some of
these old men had actually won these new wives against the stiff competition
of some younger men, some of them schoolteachers who came to the villages.
“This girl has got to be impressed by my canvas shoes.” Mind you, the younger
men didn’t speak the language that those girls understood and they were beaten
by the old men. That’s howThe Lion and the Jewelcame to be written.
The mental leap in this account from Britain to Nigeria, from Charlie
Chaplin to randy octogenarians in his own country, underscores the
universal quality of Soyinka’s dramatization in this play of sexual rivalry