Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” It is a great challenge to reconcile these two aspects of Soyinka’s the-
oretical and practical interest in ritual: the most autochthonous, pristine
African ritual forms and idioms, side by side with a view of the “ritual
matrix” as not only universal but inherently emancipatory and even revo-
lutionary. Where most contemporary Western, and Western-influenced
African and Asian interest in the interface between drama and ritual
is deeply inflected with doubts and hesitations, Soyinka’s approach to
this interface is self-assured and clamant; and it is insistent that drama’s
renewal as a cultural medium able to respond to the great crises and
contradictions of the present age lies in a recombining fusion with ritual.
As we shall see, what gives this insistence compelling force is not an un-
ambiguous recuperation of rituals and ritualism, but the fact that in his
most successful plays and theoretical essays, Soyinka subjects ritual to
what we may call “anti-ritual.” Thus, if the Nigerian dramatist’s theatre
is indeed a “theatre of ritual vision,” “ritual” in his dramas and theories
comes with layers of formalistic and thematic reconfigurations which
considerably interrogate the legitimacy and value of the pristine ritual
traditions that Soyinka deploys in his plays, especially in his greatest
dramatic creations.
Admittedly, the scholarly inflation of the significance of ritual in
Soyinka’s dramaturgy follows the lead provided by the playwright him-
self in his theoretical writings on drama and theatre. In all the essays on
drama inMyth, Literature and the African Worldas well as a few inArt, Dialogue
and Outrage, ritual is pervasively invoked as a revitalizing and revolution-
izing source for contemporary drama and theatre. Particularly notable in
this conception of ritual in Soyinka’s theory of drama and performance
is the complete phenomenological identity that he more or less estab-
lishes between ritual and revolution when he insists, in the essay “Drama
and the Idioms of Liberation,” on the “ritual nature of liberation itself
(ADO,).” From this perspective, Brian Crow is entirely justified in
calling Soyinka’s theatre a “theatre of ritual vision,” just as Derek Wright
in his bookSoyinka Revisitedhas cause to devote two of his three chap-
ters on Soyinka’s dramatic corpus to ritual and its diverse expressions
in his dramatic art. However, this isonly a partial reading of Soyinka’s
theoretical writings. And as we have seen in the dramaturgic eclecticism
that pervades Soyinka’s major plays, it is a definitely skewed perspec-
tive on Soyinka’s dramas themselves. Thus, as a theoretical framework
for analyzing and interpreting Soyinka’s most important plays, what I
would call the “ritual problematic” in the analysis and evaluation of his
achievements as a dramatist needs a review. Such a review will serve, in