Wole Soyinka
local Nigerian and African traditions and realities. Both plays also have
all the hallmarks of modern, avant-garde drama: plotlessness, or radi-
cal non-linearity of plot; protagonists who defy any simple or coherent
categorization in terms of who they are and what their motivations are;
a dramaturgical method which foregrounds language and other means
of expression as artistic means of production and representation whose
yield in terms of aesthetic, political or ethical impact cannot be taken
for granted. These qualities seem on the surface to mark these plays
as dramas that deliberately eschew artistic constraints or even control.
One critic has thus aptly calledThe Roada “play of poetry and atmo-
sphere rather than action,”and another critic has written ofMadmen
and Specialistsas a play of “loose montage of performing stunts on the part
of the mendicants, of abrupt changes or gradual slippages from events
which are presented as the traditional dialogic interaction of established
characters.”But this is only a partial aspect of these two plays which
in fact, within the perspectives of the avant-garde, show a remarkable
exercise of meticulous artistic discipline. Indeed, on the level of form and
technique, these two plays mark a crucial line of departure fromA Dance
in terms of artistic decisions and choices imposed by a subject matter
of great, disquieting import. For this reason, a comparison of similari-
ties and resonances between the two plays is useful both for the light it
casts on Soyinka’s drama in general and for clarification of the peculiar
strengths and achievements of each play.
The processes of social and technological change whichThe Roadat-
tempts to dramatize has been ably described by one critic in the following
commentary in which the play is said to be marked by
its assimilation into specifically Nigerian terms of a universal phenomenon,
brought by imperialism – petrol transport. In other words, it’s about the real
modern Nigeria: an enormous, inchoate territory whose ancient units of tribe
and religion are being supplanted by the new patterns of technology – above
all by the system of rough, weather-pitted roads along which thousands of
ramshackle, picturesquely-named lorries speed goods and passengers hundreds
of miles to market.
Given the “inchoate,” anarchic and profoundly dislocating nature of
this vast social process which I have elsewhere described as urbanization
without industrialization,“plotlessness” would seem to be a sound
artistic choice for the dramatic action ofThe Road. Similarly,Madmen
and Specialists, in dealing with not only the Nigerian civil war but with
all wars, with war psychosis as an analog for other irrationalities and