Wole Soyinka
the present context, as background for an analysis of what is unique and
significant in the plays discussed in this chapter.
With a hermeneutic neologism which tries to capture the eclectic,
modular openness of dramatic form in some of Soyinka’s tragic dra-
mas, Philip Brockbank has identified formal and thematic patterns in
Soyinka’s dramas which he designates “tragic festival.”More expan-
sively, Oyin Ogunba in the book,Theatre in Africa, makes a powerful case
for adjudging “festivals” – as a composite performative paradigm – as
perhaps the most fertile residual traditional model for modern African
drama.This is an extremely productive insight in opening up for our
consideration the suggestion that the “festival complex,” not ritual, is the
fundamental underlying paradigm for dramatic form in both Soyinka’s
dramatic works and his theories of drama and theatre. Themodularity
of this “festival complex,” both for containing and radically inverting
and deconstructing all other performance modes and idioms, includ-
ing ritual, is clearly and eloquently articulated in the following passage
from one of Soyinka’s most important – and largely ignored – theoretical
essays on drama and theatre, “Theatre in African Traditional Cultures:
Survival Patterns”:
Festivals, compromising as they do, such variety of forms, from the most spec-
tacular to the most secretive and emotionally charged, offer the most familiar
hunting ground (for the roots of drama). What is more, they constitute in them-
selvespure theatreat its most prodigal and resourceful. In short, the persistent
habit of dismissing festivals as belonging to a more “spontaneous” inartistic
expression of communities demands reexamination. The level of organization
involved, the integration of the sublime with the mundane, the endowment of
the familiar with the properties of the unique...allindicatethatitistotheheart
of many African festivals that we should look for the most stirring expressions of
man’s instinct and need for drama at its most comprehensive and community-
involving... What this implies is that instead of considering festivals from one
point of view only – that of providing, in a primitive form, the ingredients of
drama – we may even begin examining the opposite point of view: that contem-
porary drama, as we experience it today, is a contraction of drama, necessitated
by the productive order of society in other directions. (ADO,)
Can any one play, or even any corpus of plays of one playwright, success-
fully mobilize and exploit the attributes of the “festival complex” outlined
in this passage? The inventory of features of this performative paradigm
is daunting: “pure theatre at its most prodigal and resourceful,” meeting
“man’s instinct for drama at its most comprehensive and community-
involving”; integration of a “variety of forms, from the most spectacular