Wole Soyinka
farce. With regard to the dynamics of stage performance, he is probably
at his most adept in extemporizing on the classic comic and tragicomic
prototypes, as shown in such characters as Brother Jeroboam of the “Jero
plays,” Dende and the choral group of the Aweri Reformed Fraternity
inKongi’s Harvest, the slew of thugs, touts and layabouts inThe Road,
and Alaba/Eleazer/Semuwe, the changeling protagonist ofRequiem for
a Futurologist. But as the memorable protagonists of Soyinka’s most dis-
turbing and perplexing plays demonstrate, his dramatic imagination is
truly ecumenical. Even where he falters, or becomes heavy footed on
technical, formalistic grounds, he is able to hold his own as a master
of the medium. Annemarie Heywood’s spirited apologia for Soyinka’s
dramaturgy makes this point persuasively in her ripostes against Bernth
Lindfors, one of Soyinka’s most caustic critics:
The more weighty plays which take their shape from inner dialectic are sharply
criticized by Lindfors. In the progression fromA Dance of the Forests(“arty struc-
ture’, ‘plotless plot’, ‘incoherence’) viaThe Road(‘ a definitely difficult play which
makes no compromises to instant intelligibility’) toMadmen and Specialists(‘a
multifaceted cryptograph’) he (Lindfors) diagnoses a growing ‘tendency toward
meaningless frivolity which robs his work of any serious implication’ (about the
very last thing to fault in this profoundly nihilistic exploration of the deadly fol-
lies of the political animal) and wonders for whom these plays are written –
‘just for Westernized Yoruba eggheads...for a cosmopolitan international
elite...or simply for himself ?’
Whilst attacking the ‘histrionic razzle-dazzle’ of the basic articulation,
Lindfors concedes that even the plays he condemns make brilliant theatre.
Soyinka, he says, ‘can apply a very slick surface to the roughest or least sub-
stantial of narrative foundations’, and his ‘plotless plots...could be enjoyed
as a series of well-paced theatrical happenings’ without making much sense.
This is surely not good enough. The difficulty of obscure plays arises from their
idiom, or basic strategy, which is not well served by illusionist production and
‘character’-acting inviting empathy. These plays are best plotted for production
as masques or cabaret,with characters conceived as masks, dialogue as choral,
movement and gesture as emblematic. ()
The last sentence of this defense or apologia for Soyinka’s avantgarde
dramaturgy, it would seem, takes things too far. Even the most uncon-
ventional, avantgardist plays of Soyinka, with their accentuation of the
radically anti-realist, anti-mimetic modes of theatre and performance
that he calls for in “The Fourth Stage,” have substantial sequences of
realistic action and characterization. Correspondingly, Soyinka’s early
naturalistic, more or less ‘well-made’ dramas likeThe Swamp Dwellers,
The Strong Breed,Camwood on the LeavesandThe Lion and the Jewel,allhave