Music and dramatic performance in Wole Soyinka's plays

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how the song genre is used in Soyinka's plays alongside other dramatic features such as ritual, drumming, chants, dance and mime for effective theme delivery. While making reference to other related works of the playwright, the chapter will focus on the play, The Lion and the Jewel, Soyinka's well-known play that has enjoyed the status of a set-book for literature examinations in Southern Africa. Soyinka brought to his plays knowledge of Irish myths that were akin to his own traditional lore, Beckett's theatre of the absurd, the “angry” theatre of George Devine, Brecht's political theatre for the proletariat, the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte and the more recent agitprop theatres that took performances to the street. All these theatre styles were deftly endowed with Soyinka's own individual style in the plays that he wrote in the late 1950s to the early 1960s1. This chapter argues that the complexity of Soyinka's plays is his acceptance of literary syncretism as the condition of possibility for a new idiom of his plays. 1Both The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel were written in the late 1950s, but were only staged in Nigeria, at Ibadan University, while Soyinka was in London. It was after the theatre performances that they appeared in the print form.