Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” barbarisms of (dis)organized social life, the play’s departure from con-
ventions of mimetic drama – linear plots supervened by the logic of
probable, cause-and-effect development, intelligible dialogue between
characters who dialogically act as interlocutors and respondents, all of
these features operating within stable discursive regimes – is a deliber-
ate artistic choice with its own non-mimetic logic. In effect, unlike the
climactic scene of the ritual masque inA Dance, the many inscriptions
of unassimilated detail and abrupt shifts in the dramatic action of the
two plays under discussion here are carefully patterned, not on the con-
ventional protocols of external plot structure but on the internal logic of
related or contrastive motifs inThe Road, and the free association of the
phonetic and semantic resonances of words inMadmen and Specialists.For
instance, death on the roads and the highways through horrific crashes,
together with the diverse attitudes toward life and death which they en-
gender provide a link with the myriad of seemingly disconnected motifs
which undergird the “plotlessness” ofThe Road;theyalsoprovideakeyto
unraveling many seemingly esoteric, obscure inscriptions of action and
thought in the play. Indeed, underlying the “plotlessness” of the play
is a structural mythos which combines elements of a “crime mystery”
with that of a “crime thriller”: on the day of the drivers’ festival which
happened before the play proper begins, the funerary “egungun” mas-
querade was “killed” but the body “disappeared” and all the characters
sense something fishy and untoward in this “disappearance.” Particulars
Joe, the corrupt policeman is in fact on the trail of Professor, the real
“culprit”; at the end of the play, the body reappears in the “resurrec-
tion” planned by Professor; consequently, this “resurrection” and the
terrified panic that it causes, leads to Professor’s slaying at the hands
of Say-Tokyo Kid, the most terrified and at the same time the least in-
timidated by Professor’s reputed occult powers. Of course, there is no
“crime” and the “disappearance” of the body is more apparent than real
and it is precisely the totally imaginary nature of these motifs that enable
Soyinka’s treatment of this mythos of “crime mystery” and “thriller”
to give death, the disappearance (“flesh dissolution”) of bodies and the
mystery of life, part romantic, part tragicomic expressions through pow-
erfully realized characters in the grip of processes of historical change
they barely understand.
This pattern also holds true forMadmen and Specialists, though in a
somewhat more polarized fashion since the undergirding mythos here
rests on the conflict between great, all-encompassing evil and forces
and agents who act on behalf of a providential grace and munificence