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Madmen and Specialists
, no formal religious ritual or
ceremony is deployed as an organizing apparatus for its dramatic ac-
tion, 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, carniva-
lesque 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
Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex”
mixing genres beyond their normative forms and conventions, because
the critical and scholarly discussion of Soyinka’s dramatic corpus is over-
whelmingly 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 great-
est 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 per-
formance 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 schol-
arly 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 es-
says 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 as-
sociated 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 incor-
porated 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
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