Wole Soyinka: Two Nigerian Comedies

Abstract

The plays of Wole Soyinka are becoming well known to readers abroad and even finding ready production. Besides numerous university presentations Soyinka' s plays have been performed professionally in London and New York. The latter off-Broadway production was actually reviewed in Time, which is always ready to spot a trend. These productions are a high compliment to the quality of the plays and to the immediacy of the appeal they have to an audience bound essentially by cultural boundaries other than the writer's own. Wole Soyinka' s plays, though deeply committed to the African experience which makes their setting, do have a ready appeal. Two particularly, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Lion and The Jewel, have been especially popular. Wole Soyinka was one of a group of young Nigerian writers who a decade or so ago initiated a new literature an African literature, written not in the vernacular, but in English, the second language of their education. These young men, of whom Chinua Achebe the novelist and J. P. Clark the poet are best known abroad, were a new phenomenon. They were not the simple story tellers that popular ignorance expected from Africa but serious and cosmopolitan young men, well read in literature formally through their university studies, and more generally through their recognition of themselves as part of a much wider view of contemporary English language literatures across the world. Their sensitive and sophisticated works are now commonly studied in schools in many African countries and are also becoming well known in this country. Since the work of a dramatist needs stage presentation, he is in a position different from that of the novelist and poet who can expect publication. A publishing house may be willing to present a small volume of poetry or a new novel where even a financial loss may be set against the prestige of the initial intention, but dramatic production is a much more expensive and complicated matter and far greater caution is apparent. The plays of a dramatist may be published, but he must make his name initially in production, for printing will represent his success and not be the cause of it. Since the dramatist's original audience will be African, one might expect a greater difficulty in making the plays meaningful to a foreign audience, yet Wole Soyinka has solved this problem by being widely eclectic. His plays,