The “drama of existence”: sources and scope Thus, to an attentive reader or audience of the play, Samson’s terrified
self-awareness at the end of his powerfully animated impersonation of
Sergeant Burma would be one more element in the deep immersion of
this play in the imaginative and performative “worlds” of the drivers,
professional thugs, unemployed and semi-employed drifters whose lives
and foibles, with Professor’s colorful, bizarre eccentricities, Soyinka, as a
playwright whose social location is the middle class, ventriloquizes to pro-
duce the incredible mix of pathos, comedy and tragedy in the dramatic
action of the play.
The foregoing discussion opens up for our consideration another im-
portant operative principle of Soyinka’s dramaturgy. This pertains to the
extreme, radical juxtapositions that he applies to the diverse performa-
tive and expressive idioms and “languages” that he appropriates from
virtually all spheres and “worlds” of a class-divided social order. For, in
general, the kind of obliteration of the boundaries between “ritual” and
“drama” that we encounter inDeath and the King’s Horsemandoes not con-
stitute a dramaturgic norm in Soyinka’s theatre. Definitely, in plays like
The RoadandKongi’s Harvest, ritual idioms, African or Western, animist
or Christian, are deliberately kept from blending with mimetic, realistic
drama. The effect is thus more aesthetically and intellectually discon-
certing, and there is little question that this is deliberately produced by
Soyinka. It is indeed an aspect of his theatrical genius which, while in
general it has worked superbly on stage, it has nonetheless tended to con-
found many of Soyinka’sliterarycritics. Indeed, in plays such asMadmen
and Specialists,Requiem for a FuturologistandFrom Zia with Lovewhere either
a ferocious satire or an irreverent parody predominates in the dramatic
action, the heterogeneous idioms and “languages” are set off against one
another in dissonant, contrapuntal collisions. This point has been elo-
quently made by Joachim Fiebach in a comment on the dramatic action
ofMadmen and Specialists:
The drama...is a loose montage of performing stunts on the part of the mendi-
cants, of abrupt changes or gradual slippages from events which are presented
as the traditional dialogic interaction of established characters’ addresses to
the audience. Dr. Bero, the system’s specialist’s claim that the given order is
holy, an immutable social system, is constantly debunked by the various mock-
ing activities of his own watchdogs and by his father, the Old Man’s irreverent
attitudes...Absolute contradiction, ambivalence, and constant reversal of atti-
tudes are dominant features.
What this quote demonstrates is the fact that Soyinka’s great penchant
for parody makes him especially attentive to the discrepant articulations
within, and between the “languages” of the social groups and spheres of