Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” catch himself passing it instantly to Demoke who has come running as before.
All action stops again, including the first and second Triplets who have never
ceased to ‘ampe’. They all look at Demoke, who stands confused, not knowing
what the next step should be. He decides eventually to restore the child to the
Dead Woman, and attempts to do so. Eshuoro partially blocks his way and
appeals to Forest Head. Ogun appeals against him.) (CP,–)
Most critics, following the suggestion of Eldred Jones in the first, full-
length study of Soyinka’s writings, have read the struggle of Eshuoro
and Ogun for the Half-Child as a struggle for the life, the soul of the
then newly independent nation of Nigeria and, beyond that, the “new
nations” of Lucy Mair’s famous monograph of the same title.Since the
Half-Child ends up with Demoke rather than Eshuoro, this has been read
as a somewhat hopeful sign. This is an ingenious, if somewhat strained
reading of the published script of the play, a reading which the per-
formance script, the staged production, not only obscures, but actually
considerably mystifies. Demoke and his companions leave the “dance in
the forest” chastened, but they do so in the grip of an unshakable perplex-
ity which has apparently extended to the scholarly commentary on the
play. InA Dance, the destructive energies that must be ritually cleansed or
purged are concentrated in Eshuoro and Ogun on the side of the deities,
and in Demoke, Rola and Adenebi, on the side of the humans. The two
deities are entirely unmoved by the catharsis of the trial scene, but the
three human protagonists, especially Demoke, become less blind to the
terrible destruction caused by the past and present acting out of their
egotistical drives, desires or appetites. These are the dialogical faces of
ritual negation and affirmation in Soyinka’s dramatization of the “ritual
problematic” in this play.
The Road and Madmen and Specialists have the distinction among
Soyinka’s most ambitious plays of locating ritual and festivity, as
paradigms for dramatic form, among the “lower” social orders, end-
ing up with rather startling expressions of the Bakhtinian carnival of the
oppressed. Moreover, in both plays, these paradigms are mobilized and
carefully manipulated by extremely eccentric and irreverent protagonists
who, at one level, have made the cause of the oppressed their own. These
are respectively Professor inThe Roadand the Old Man, perhaps the two
most enigmatic and unforgettable characters in modern African drama.
The RoadandMadmen and Specialistsare also the best examples in Soyinka’s
drama of “art theatre,” of “cult plays” tailored to the aesthetic taste and
sensibilities of a cultural elite which is institutionally transnational and
cosmopolitan; paradoxically, however, both plays have strong roots in