Wole Soyinka
action, is elaborately constructed around festive, ritual or carnivalesque
performance modes; moreover,The Road, Madmen and SpecialistsandThe
Bacchae of Euripidesalso feature parodies and burlesques of the very per-
formance modes that organize the particular play’s central action and
conflict. The deployment of this dramaturgic method is probably at its
most formalistically extravagant inA Dance of the Forestsand at its most
controlled and most technically polished inDeath and the King’s Horse-
man. In the former play, the climactic scene – in which the unwelcome
dead who return as revenant ghosts confront representatives of living
generations – entails a stunning variety and clash of performance modes
mobilized by the young playwright then at the beginning of his career
as a dramatist. This dramaturgic boldness is also very much in evidence
inThe RoadandMadmen and Specialists, even if these plays show greater
artistic control thanA Dance of the Forests. Ritual festivity is concentrated
and reaches its climax inThe Roadin the flashback scene which reen-
acts the day of the accident during the drivers’ festival when Murano,
masked as an ancestralegungunspirit, was knocked down and presumed
dead by Kotonu and Samson. But the entire dramatic action of the play
is punctuated by songs, jests and plays-within-the-play performed by
the ensemble of all the characters, occasionally including even Professor
and Particulars Joe who are not part of the chorus of drivers, apprentices,
passenger “touts” and layabouts that constitute a sort of ambiguous col-
lective antagonist to Professor’s protagonist role in the dramatic action
of the play. As forMadmen and Specialists, no formal religious ritual or
ceremony is deployed as an organizing apparatus for its dramatic ac-
tion, but the play features elaborate parodies of both Christian liturgy
and African ritual idioms in the games and antics of the mendicants
and their mentor, the Old Man. And the play’s central object of savage,
ironic deflation is “As,” a polyvalent dramatic conceit on fundamentalist
or absolutist modes and systems of thought which, with their ancillary
practices, work to normalize warfare, warmongering and gross abuses
of power in the name of patriotism, honor or even religious duty and
piety. It is as a deity, with its priesthood and apologists, that this conceit
“As” is subjected to ferocious ironic debunking by the Old Man and his
acolytes. This is the reason why, of all of Soyinka’s plays,Madmen and
Specialistsis about the only drama in which the use of festive, carniva-
lesque performance modes has a completely unrelieved sardonic edge
to it.
It has been necessary to demonstrate Soyinka’s predilection, in this
group of his most ambitious plays, for stretching generic boundaries, for