Notes to pages– In “Press Release from the Swedish Academy,”Black American Literature Forum,
vol.,no.(Fall),.
The most caustic of the negative reviews of the staging of the play as part of
the Independence celebrations was Peter Pan’s (Enahoro) revealingly titled
notice, “A Dance of the Forests: Wole Soyinka has Overdone It This Time” in
Daily Times(Lagos), (October), p.. For other reviews at the time,
see Ulli Beier, “Review ofDance of the Forests,”Black Orpheus,,–,
and Una Cockshott, “A Dance of the Forests,”Ibadan,(November),
–.
On this point, Gibbs has written the following observations based on the
first stage performance of the play that he watched: “In, Derek Bullock
directed the play with boys from Government College, Kaduna, and it was
performed at the University of Ibadan. The production was not perfect: the
set did not fit the Arts Theatre stage, the music and dance elements had not
been adequately worked out and the castwas uneven. However, Funso Alabi
as Samson and Bullock as Professor were outstandingly good and the play
made a tremendous impact. The audience was held throughout; responsive
laughter greeted humor which, in reading the text, I had thought was rather
labored... The lesson to draw from this is that it is necessary to stand back
from Soyinka’s words in order to appreciate the stage images he creates and
the patterns into which his plays fall.” In James Gibbs,Wole Soyinka, New
York: Grove Press,,–.
See Femi Osofisan’s moving tribute to Soyinka’s influence on himself and
a whole generation of Nigerian playwrights and actors, “Wole Soyinka
and a Living Dramatist: A Playwright’s Encounter with Soyinka’s Drama,”
in Adele Maja-Pearce (ed.),Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Heinemann,,
–.
For informative and moving testimonies on their work with Soyinka, see
the contributions of some of these collaborators and followers of Soyinka to
the book of tributes to the author,Before Our Very Eyes, ed. Dapo Adelugba,
Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books,.
Michael Etherton,The Development of African Drama, London: Hutchinson
University Library for Africa,, Chapter, “Traditional Performance
in Contemporary Society,”–; and Karen Barber,I Could Speak Until
Tomorrow: “Oriki,” Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town, Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press,, especially Chapter,“The‘Oriki’of
Big Men,”–. Etherton and Barber both discuss the complex and
fascinating ways in which “big men” appropriate important Yoruba expres-
sive and performative forms and idioms to enhance their self-esteem and
social standing. The following observations by Etherton is fairly indicative
of this point: “Ogunde’s theatre company is Hubert Ogunde. His theatre
is a Yoruba theatre, performed in Yoruba which embraces wit and poetry.
The fans come to see and hear him; and to an outsider it appears that no
member of his cast can steal the focus of the audience from him. This is the
essence, it seems, of the most successful of the travelling theatres: the cre-
ation of a ‘personality,’ a unique person through whom Yoruba of all walks