The Lion and the Jewel on BBC Radio: An Audience Survey

Abstract

Plays by African playwrights have been staged in many parts of the world, but it is hard to find reliable surveys of how non- African audiences have responded to them. Reviewers may have remarked on whether a particular theatrical production was received well or poorly by those who saw it, but such reports often were impressionistic, lacking any direct input from the scores of eyewitnesses present at a performance who may have viewed the play differently. Missing from discussions of the international reception of African drama have been adequate samples of the diverse reactions of theatregoers outside Africa.1 We need a larger body of data on which to draw our conclusions.One example of a good audience survey may suffice. On 19 May and 5 June 1966, the Drama Department of the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme aired a dramatic reading of Wole Soyinka's Lion and the Jewel to radio listeners in the UK. BBC 's Audience Research Department then sent out a questionnaire to more than 1,300 members of their Third Programme Listening Panel asking for reactions to the play. They received 120 responses, roughly nine percent of the total number solicited, from those who reported having heard all or most of the broadcast. Before examining the range and variety of these responses, however, it may be well to review Soyinka's activities in the UK and elsewhere before May 1966 in order to assess whether his name is likely to have been known to the British public before this radio transmission.2Soyinka had studied at the University of Leeds between 1954 and 1957, earning a B.A. with an Upper Second in English Honours and beginning work toward an M.A. that he never completed. Upon leaving Leeds, he moved to London, where he worked as a substitute teacher, a broadcaster for the bbc 's Calling West Africa programme, and a script reader for the Royal Court Theatre. During this time he produced one of his earliest plays, The Swamp Dwellers, for the Annual Drama Festival of the National Union of Students held at the University of London in September 1958, and fourteen months later he wrote, produced, and acted in an evening programme at the Royal Court Theatre that included performances of two other early plays, The Invention and excerpts from Dance of the African Forest (which he later amplified and published as A Dance of the Forests), as well as readings of some of his poems. He also published a few short stories in university literary magazines. However, these accomplishments would not have been widely noticed in Britain. He was still a young, unknown writer lacking a discernible public profile.In i960 he returned to Nigeria on a two-year Rockefeller fellowship that afforded him freedom to travel widely and to write, act, broadcast, and form his own theatre company, the i960 Masks. In 1962 he began teaching at the University of lie campus in Ibadan and the following year moved to the University of Lagos, but he continued to devote much of his time and energy to theatrical activities and other creative pursuits. In 1963, he published his first three books: Three Plays, A Dance of the Forests, and Lion and the Jewel, the latter two under the joint imprint of Oxford University Press in London and Ibadan. He also organized a guerrilla drama troupe, Orisun Theatre, which specialized in partly improvised performances of political and social satire. In September 1965 he was back in the UK recording his radio play The Detainee for the BBC, participating in a Commonwealth Arts Festival by taking part in a Poetry Conference in Cardiff and a Festival of Poetry at the Royal Court Theatre, and serving as an adviser on a production of his new play, Road, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Later that year, in the midst of an election campaign in Nigeria, he was arrested and charged with holding up an Ibadan radio station at gunpoint to prevent the airing of a victory speech by Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, but the judge who presided over the case in court acquitted him on a technicality. …