Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” celebrate the glorious past and hopeful future of the assembled “tribes”
turns into an unanticipated encounter with monstrous evils in the past
and present life of the community.The Road, written for, and staged
at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in, dramatizes the profound
dislocating impact of the forces of technology and social and cultural
change on the daily lives of the newly urbanized working poor of West
African cities who try to make a living out of professions associated with
the roads and the highways.Madmen and Specialists, the first of Soyinka’s
plays written and staged after his release from incarceration during the
Nigerian civil war, is in fact based partly on that war; it quite appropri-
ately dramatizes the horrific transference of war psychosis at the battle
front into a terminal struggle between the two central characters of the
play, a father and his son, both of whom have seen service in the war
front. Of all of Soyinka’s plays,Death and the King’s Horsemanis perhaps
the most event-specific in its derivation; it dramatizes the famous inci-
dent inwhen the British colonial authorities prevented the carrying
out of a customary ritual suicide by an important chief, a ritual suicide
intended to officially conclude the funerary ceremonies for one of the
most important indigenous rulers in colonial Nigeria, the Alafin of Oyo.
In Soyinka’s dramatization of this event, the tragic and unanticipated
reversals which result from this intervention are presented in the form of
ritual festivity of great poetic elegance and performative sublimity which,
nonetheless, undermine both the moral authority of the colonizers and
the spiritual security of the colonized. Finally, pressing historical circum-
stance inThe Bacchae of Euripidesis more indirectly indicated than in the
other plays since this is after all an adapted play from classical European
antiquity. It is indeed in the changes that Soyinka makes in the conflicts
and characterization in his version of the Euripides play that we can
see the pressure of historical context in the dramatic action of this play.
For instance, Soyinka expands Euripides’ chorus of non-Greek “Asian
women” to include insurrectionary slaves whose leader is cast in the mold
of the famous leaders of the black slave revolts in the African diaspora in
the Americas. Moreover, in Soyinka’s text, themes of empire and colony,
of life-denying autocracy and the nature-based, life-affirming popular
revolt that it engenders, assume far more explicit and urgent expression
than they do in the Euripides original.
If these are Soyinka’s “weightier plays” in terms of the historical or so-
ciopolitical pertinence of the subject matter that they dramatize, they are
no less notable in their dramaturgic distinctiveness. For in every one of
these plays, the central conflict, even the entire compass of the dramatic