Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” to the most secret”; and a montage of modes bringing “the sublime with
the mundane” and “the endowment of the familiar with the properties
of the unique.” In prefatory remarks that he appended to the publica-
tion of the English-language adaptation of Peter Weiss’ celebrated play,
Marat-Sade, which he had given a famous, critically successful production,
Peter Brook mentions the fact that what some London critics hostile to
the production ofMarat-Sadehad found dubious and unacceptable were
the very things he found admirable in Weiss’ play: fusion and clash of
diverse forms and styles of performance – Brechtian, didactic, absurdist,
total theatre, and Theatre of Cruelty.
The hostility of the theatre critics that produced Brook’s apologia for
Weiss is a validation of Soyinka’s contention in the quote from “Theatre
in Traditional African Cultures” that “contemporary drama,” as we
experience it today, is a contraction of drama that is “necessitated by
the productive order of society in other directions.” But Soyinka and
Brook seem to part company on the question of how to overcome that
“contraction,” or the resources available to the dramatist or director
for its transcendence. Brook sees that transcendence as a rare occur-
rence, as indeed often fortuitous; by contrast, Soyinka sees it as repeat-
able, as indeed axiomatic, precisely because for him, unlike the Western
playwright, the African dramatist has available vibrantly extant tradi-
tions of “festival theatre.” And a consequence of this difference between
Brook and Soyinka is that for Soyinka, the question of how to overcome
the generic over-differentiation and “contraction” of drama is never one
of mere technique or method, but is also one of socio-historical con-
text. Specifically, in Soyinka’s case, it is a matter of the “imperative of
appropriate response” to the human and social crises and dilemmas of
post-independence, postcolonial Africa and beyond these, the crises and
malaise of the modern world.
These perspectives place the “ritual problematic” in Soyinka’s greatest
dramatic works in an expanded framework of form and subject matter,
style and meaning, which drastically undercuts the inflation of the signif-
icance of ritual and its associated idioms to a controlling, regulative norm
by many scholars of Soyinka’s drama. Definitely, in each of the five plays
discussed in this chapter, ritual is not only usually placed within a “festival
complex” containing other performance modes, it is in fact quite often
parodied, subverted or deconstructed by some of these other idioms. If
this is the case, the central question for analysis and interpretation is
how this pattern of simultaneous ritual affirmation and negation oper-
ates in each play, and the particular pressure of historic and sociopolitical