In the selection of pretenders, a new ‘king maker’ takes part, it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were to be borne aloft by it . . . Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual . . . (and) it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity to the light of power.

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

The plays discussed in this chapter are amongst Soyinka’s most ambitious and most memorable dramas, but are also the most pessimistic in his dramatic corpus: A Dance of the Forests, The Road, Madmen and Specialists, Death and the King’s Horseman and The Bacchae of Euripides. Moreover, in terms of form and craft, and of language and ideas, Soyinka is at his most resourceful and most vigorous in this group of dark, brooding plays. Because each of these plays deals with, or derives directly from a major historical event or crisis, the dramatist’s artistic resourcefulness in the plays seems in turn to be linked to that element in his career as a dramatist that we have identified in Chapter of this study as the imperative of appropriate response. Within the logic of this imperative, an historic event, a widespread socioeconomic trend, or worldhistorical forces which engender massive individual and collective crises of conscience find Soyinka responding through dramas which, in order to match the instigating event or condition, contain startling or provocative formalistic and thematic expressions. How does this operate in each of these plays?

A Dance of the Forests was written and produced as part of the Nigerian independence celebrations in; appropriate to the historic task of forging a nation out of diverse peoples and communities that the celebrations symbolically entailed, the central action of the play revolves around a “gathering of the tribes” at which the festivities intended to celebrate the glorious past and hopeful future of the assembled “tribes” turns into an unanticipated encounter with monstrous evils in the past and present life of the community. The Road, written for, and staged at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in, dramatizes the profound dislocating impact of the forces of technology and social and cultural change on the daily lives of the newly urbanized working poor of West African cities who try to make a living out of professions associated with the roads and the highways. Madmen and Specialists, the first of Soyinka’s plays written and staged after his release from incarceration during the Nigerian civil war, is in fact based partly on that war; it quite appropriately dramatizes the horrific transference of war psychosis at the battle front into a terminal struggle between the two central characters of the play, a father and his son, both of whom have seen service in the war front. Of all of Soyinka’s plays, Death and the King’s Horseman is perhaps the most event-specific in its derivation; it dramatizes the famous incident in when the British colonial authorities prevented the carrying out of a customary ritual suicide by an important chief, a ritual suicide intended to officially conclude the funerary ceremonies for one of the most important indigenous rulers in colonial Nigeria, the Alafin of Oyo. In Soyinka’s dramatization of this event, the tragic and unanticipated reversals which result from this intervention are presented in the form of ritual festivity of great poetic elegance and performative sublimity which, nonetheless, undermine both the moral authority of the colonizers and the spiritual security of the colonized. Finally, pressing historical circumstance in The Bacchae of Euripides is more indirectly indicated than in the other plays since this is after all an adapted play from classical European antiquity. It is indeed in the changes that Soyinka makes in the conflicts and characterization in his version of the Euripides play that we can see the pressure of historical context in the dramatic action of this play. For instance, Soyinka expands Euripides’ chorus of non-Greek “Asian women” to include insurrectionary slaves whose leader is cast in the mold of the famous leaders of the black slave revolts in the African diaspora in the Americas. Moreover, in Soyinka’s text, themes of empire and colony, of life-denying autocracy and the nature-based, life-affirming popular revolt that it engenders, assume far more explicit and urgent expression than they do in the Euripides original.

(«Орман биі» Soyinka-ның Нигерияның ел тәуелсіздігіне арналған шығармаларының біріне жатады. Ұқсамаған ұлттар мен топтар бірігіп бір мемлекеттің шаңырағын көтерген. Шығарманың символдық тұсы осы «тайпалар жиналысынан» бастау алады. Жақсы үміт пен нұрлы болашаққа көз салған жиналыс бүгінгі таңның керағар шындығымен үндесіп кетеді де соңы адам айтқысыз бақытсыздыққа бастайды. Ағылшын одағы өнер мерекесінде қойылған «Жол» пьесасында техниканың дамуы қоғамды қалай өзгерткенін, кедейліктің қамытын мықтап киген Батыс Африканың қарапайым тұрғындарының өмірімен ұштастырып береді. Сол адамдар жолмен және жолға қатысты тірлікпен айналысады. «Алкеуде мен маман» Soyinka-ның Нигерия азамат соғысы тұсында түрмеден шыққан соң алғаш сахна көрген шығармасы. Бұл соғыспен қатысы бар туынды. Соғыстың сұмдығы, ондағы қатгездік пен сорақылықты драматург қолына қару алып қан төгіске қатысқан, шепте жүрген әкелі-балалы екеудің болмысымен береді. «Өлім және ханның батыры» пьесасының қамтыған аумағы кең. Ол бір болған оқиғаны түрлендіріп берген. Ағылшын отаршылдары жергілікті бір тайпа басшысының салтқа айналған «өзін құрбандыққа шалу» рәсімінде өлуіне тоқтау салғанымен қатысты... )

If these are Soyinka’s “weightier plays” in terms of the historical or sociopolitical pertinence of the subject matter that they dramatize, they are no less notable in their dramaturgic distinctiveness. For in every one of these plays, the central conflict, even the entire compass of the dramatic action, is elaborately constructed around festive, ritual or carnivalesque performance modes; moreover, The Road, Madmen and Specialists and The Bacchae of Euripides also feature parodies and burlesques of the very performance modes that organize the particular play’s central action and conflict. The deployment of this dramaturgic method is probably at its most formalistically extravagant in A Dance of the Forests and at its most controlled and most technically polished in Death and the King’s Horseman. In the former play, the climactic scene – in which the unwelcome dead who return as revenant ghosts confront representatives of living generations – entails a stunning variety and clash of performance modes mobilized by the young playwright then at the beginning of his career as a dramatist. This dramaturgic boldness is also very much in evidence in The Road and Madmen and Specialists, even if these plays show greater artistic control than A Dance of the Forests. Ritual festivity is concentrated and reaches its climax in The Road in the flashback scene which reenacts the day of the accident during the drivers’ festival when Murano, masked as an ancestral egungun spirit, was knocked down and presumed dead by Kotonu and Samson. But the entire dramatic action of the play is punctuated by songs, jests and plays-within-the-play performed by the ensemble of all the characters, occasionally including even Professor and Particulars Joe who are not part of the chorus of drivers, apprentices, passenger “touts” and layabouts that constitute a sort of ambiguous collective antagonist to Professor’s protagonist role in the dramatic action of the play. As for Madmen and Specialists, no formal religious ritual or ceremony is deployed as an organizing apparatus for its dramatic action, but the play features elaborate parodies of both Christian liturgy and African ritual idioms in the games and antics of the mendicants and their mentor, the Old Man. And the play’s central object of savage, ironic deflation is “As,” a polyvalent dramatic conceit on fundamentalist or absolutist modes and systems of thought which, with their ancillary practices, work to normalize warfare, warmongering and gross abuses of power in the name of patriotism, honor or even religious duty and piety. It is as a deity, with its priesthood and apologists, that this conceit “As” is subjected to ferocious ironic debunking by the Old Man and his acolytes. This is the reason why, of all of Soyinka’s plays, Madmen and Specialists is about the only drama in which the use of festive, carnivalesque performance modes has a completely unrelieved sardonic edge to it.

It has been necessary to demonstrate Soyinka’s predilection, in this group of his most ambitious plays, for stretching generic boundaries, for mixing genres beyond their normative forms and conventions, because the critical and scholarly discussion of Soyinka’s dramatic corpus is overwhelmingly dominated by a sort of neoclassicism which sees ritual – and idioms closely linked to it – as a sort of regulative dramaturgic paradigm in the playwright’s major dramas, including all the plays discussed here. The underlying heuristic premise of the discussion of Soyinka’s greatest plays in this chapter is that though it looms large in his armory of dramaturgic models, ritual is only one among a wide variety of performance modes appropriated by the playwright in his most ambitious plays. Moreover, it is significant that Soyinka constantly subjects ritual to what one scholar has called “comic inspection.” This has important implications for our discussion of Soyinka’s most ambitious plays in this chapter.

 In an important essay which attempts a summation of the common themes and forms linking all of Soyinka’s plays, Brian Crow has described Soyinka’s theatre as a “theatre of ritual vision.” Ritual undoubtedly plays a central role in Soyinka’s major plays, and it is also a central element in his theories of drama and theatre. Consequently, there are literally scores of scholarly essays exploring ritual as theme and formal model in Soyinka’s plays. Among the most notable of this body of scholarly and critical exploration of ritual in Soyinka’s drama and theatrical theory are chapters and extended sections in books by Oyin Ogunba, Stephan Larsen, Ketu Katrak, Derek Wright and Mary David, and essays by Philip Brockbank, Brian Crow, Ato Quayson, Adebayo Williams and Isidore Okpewho. In nearly all the books and essays written by these scholars and critics, there is a critical consensus that ritual – and all its associated idioms and motifs – serves as an unambiguously vitalizing and enriching source for Soyinka’s most original, most thought-provoking formal and thematic expressions. However, in spite of this consensus, Derek Wright has aptly observed that there is great unevenness in the critical and scholarly rigour of the essays dealing with the place of ritual in Soyinka’s plays and theories. Beyond this unevenness, two aspects of the Nigerian dramatist’s interest in ritual, both in his plays and his theories, have been almost entirely left out of this extensive discussion, aspects that reveal far greater ambiguity in his appropriation of ritual than the scholarly and critical consensus would allow.

First, there is the fact that the rituals that Soyinka has generally incorporated into his plays and that he has theorized about, are usually some of the most ancient, the most autochthonous rituals. In the light of this fact, though some of these rituals are still performed in traditional religious festivals today, they survive precariously under the combined weight of repressive Christian proselytization, the rise of secular, rational worldviews, and the material forces of technology and economic production. From the perspective of the onslaught of these forces, cultic rituals are little more than archaisms without the dynamism they may have once had. In other words, the historic context of the ritual idioms that Soyinka deploys in his dramas corresponds remarkably to what Rene Girard in his seminal book, Violence and the Sacred, has called “the sacrificial crisis.” By this term Girard means the relentless and inevitable decline of the social and metaphysical sanctions which once gave sacrificial rituals their ethical legitimacy and psychological efficacy. As Girard blithely puts it: “If, as is often the case, we encounter the institution of sacrifice either in an advanced state of decay or reduced to relative insignificance, it is because it has already undergone a good deal of wear and tear .” It is part of Girard’s ethnocentrism in this otherwise seminal work that for him, “the sacrificial crisis” has taken place only in the Western world, whereas a rigorous application of the logic of his insights should indicate that this “crisis” cannot but eventuate everywhere in the modern world. We will return later to the implications of this for Soyinka’s most ambitious plays.

The second aspect of Soyinka’s interest in ritual that has generally escaped the attention of students of his works seems like a direct obverse of the first aspect. This is the fact that in his writings as a theorist and critic, Soyinka has tended to approach other playwrights, writers and artists with the paradigm and values of what he calls the “ritual matrix.” This practice has fostered a remarkably flexible and subtle deployment of the paradigm and has produced often compelling, highly idiosyncratic readings of diverse African and Western playwrights, directors and artists. Among Western dramatists in particular, this supple application by Soyinka of the paradigm of the “ritual matrix” has produced extraordinarily fresh readings of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Max Frisch’s Count Oederland and Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, and the work of the director Ariane Mnouchkine. More generally, Soyinka’s comments, through the symbolic prism of ritual, on such artists as Vassily Kandinsky, Francis Bacon and Peter Brook have provided a fresh approach to their works. And among African dramatists and writers, he has, through this rubric of ritual and its alleged liberating values, produced notable if controversial readings of Duro Ladipo, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe and Femi Osofisan.

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