Soyinka's Euripides: Postcolonial Resistance or Avant-Garde Adaptation?

Abstract

After encountering Isidore Okpewho's essay Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire (in RAL 30A: 32-55), I was challenged not only to read Euripides's The Bacchae through the lens of Soyinka's adaptation but further to read Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides as a reac? tion to the source text through the lens of Okpewho's critical eyes. This kind of comparative reading entails unraveling a dense web of intertextu? ality inherent in a dramaturgical approach to contemporary theatrical adaptations of classical plays. First, there are my own?multiple readings of at least five translation/adaptations of The Bacchae over a 35-year period. Second, there are Soyinka's essays about Yoruba myths and cosmology; his connection to and interpretation of the god Ogun and his significance to Yoruba society; his critique of, as well as insistence upon, the community's need of the carrier and scapegoating rituals of purification for the New Year among the Yoruba, Ijo, and Onitsha that surface in such plays as The Strong Breed and Death and the King's Horseman. In addition there is the fact that Soyinka mastered English and European drama under the tutelage of G. Wilson Knight and with the encouragement ofthe Royal Court Theater managed to have a young playwright's dream fulfilled: full-scale produc? tions of The Swamp Dwelkrs and The Invention within a year of his graduation; and The Lion and the Jewel and The Road in London in 1966. Complicating this reading further is the fact that The Bacchae of Euripides was commissioned by the National Theatre, a politically sawy move since Soyinka had proven his prowess as an anglophone African playwright whose theater met Eurocentric standards but relied on Afrocentric aes?