Most of his works contain paradoxes, and they address basic issues we have in the community, and bring out amassed wisdom. In terms of women, there’s a very dominant, strong woman, and you see the strength of their character and you see how he uses them to portray the culture, because as we know, the women were the custodians of culture at the time
By Godwin Okondo
‘STAGING Wole Soyinka’ was the expository webinar National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP) recently convened that had prominent theatre directors and Soyinka scholars alike sharing their experiences of bringing the works of the ren4owned playwright, poet and Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka to life on stage. Held virtually on Saturday, August 4, 2024, the event featured a distinguished panel of experts from the academia and the performing arts sector, who shared invaluable insights into the challenges and triumphs of interpreting Soyinka’s deeply nuanced plays for contemporary audiences across the globe.
Among the numerous guests who joined the programme included the conveners and NANTAP President, NANTAP, Mr. Israel Eboh; its Secretary General, Mr. Makinde Adeniran, with theatre director, Om’Oba Jerry Adesewo and performer, Oluwaseun Odukoya (aka Aunty Shine Shine) moderating. Others were Dr. Ola Ifatimehin of Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Bayero University Kano; founder of Crown Troupe of Africa, Mr. Segun Adefila; culture communicator, Mr. Jahman Anikulapo; Prof. Rasheedah Liman of Ahmadu Bello University; Dr. Kole Odutola of University of Florida, US; Ayo Jaiyesimi of Thespian Family Theatre & Productions; DVC, Prof. Duro Oni of University of Lagos and Advisory Board chairperson of The Nigeria Prize for Literature, Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and publisher of TheArtHubNg, Mr. Another Ajeluorou.
Adesewo briefly said the session was “to know the perspectives of these practitioners and scholars who have staged Wole Soyinka for the purpose of learning, reflection and documentation.”
President, NANTAP, Mr. Eboh towed a similar path in his opening remark, when he said, “We are all contributing to honouring a Nigerian icon, who is also a global icon, whom God has been gracious towards for celebrating 90 years. For us at NANTAP, this is the least we can do to celebrate him, knowing that a lot has been done, colloquiums and all other activities to celebrate his birthday. We felt we needed to focus on his works that have been staged and to also get the perspectives of those who have staged these plays.
“Too often, a lot of directors will tell you Soyinka’s plays are very difficult, but we also know these plays are full of creative possibilities for those who would open their minds and look at them as creative works with a lot of images behind the stories. Today is also our way of celebrating the works of this great Nigerian. I want to particularly appreciate Prof. Duro Oni for joining us. We know how involved and engaged he has been in celebrating Soyinka, and we also know how impactful he has been to us and our association; he has always encouraged us and he will always find time to be available. We want to also appreciate all who have agreed to speak to this topic.
“There’s Jahman Anikulapo, who I am sure will have a lot to say, having over the years critiqued and reported on a lot of performances of Soyinka; we will get a lot of insights from him. I also want to thank Anote for being here. Incidentally, both Anote and Jahman are from The Guardian stock, the newspaper that charted a new path for theatre criticism and reporting in Nigeria. Thank you for being here with us and we know we will benefit a lot from you.”
For co-moderator Odukoya, “Soyinka is worthy of this celebration and it has been month-long, and I have been part of at least two, and I think it’s an interesting tangent for NANTAP to speak about staging Soyinka’s plays. Incidentally, at one event a student raiseed a question about the perception Soyinka’s works as being difficult. So, I hope our academics invited our students to benefit from the wealth of knowledge and experiences of our speakers who would share their experiences of how they cracked the nut of staging and directing Soyinka’s plays.”
Prof. Wole Soyinka
Staging Soyinka
IFATIMEHIN, whose Ph.D thesis was on Soyinka’s works, took the first shot, when he said, “On the matter of staging Soyinka, I want to commend and appreciate the fact that the tone has been set from that angle, because usually when people are invited to talk about performances they have done, they tend to pretend that the author is dead, and I’m glad that this author is alive, and he embodies and represents his works.
“This sets the tone for me in my experience of staging his work, Death and the King’s Horseman. So, staging Soyinka entails that there is a worldview, ideology, perception and theoretical frame in terms of his works and the way he views life, the way he scripts and creates worlds around him in terms of the issues he brings on board in his plays. Staging Death and the King’s Horseman would entail that one understands the African traditional performance system. An understanding of culture is key to an understanding of Soyinka’s performance, and this culture would include how we handle and distill music, how we look at storytelling, how we approach and appreciate our worldviews and that is what Death and the King’s Horseman, in terms of its staging, represents for me.”
“In staging Death and The King’s Horseman, we played a lot with African performance systems, because the market women were formed into some orchestra, where the Iyaloja becomes the leader of the market women and orchestra, where she raises songs and guides the mood, tone, direction and the entire flow of the performance in the market square. After she leaves the market square, we see her in prison, where Elesin Oba is being held up, and she still embodies that character trait of performance.
“The Elesin Oba, the larger-than-life character, was also embodied to represent that royal essence. We also introduced the western performative system, especially because we have the colonials present in the performance. We placed these performative styles side by side, to show the richness of the African performance tradition, as against the western conception of the world and how heroism is conceived and all that, and you could see Soyinka’s bias to the African traditional system, the superiority of the African notion of life, his worldview and projection in that performance.
“The argument we were making was that Soyinka was deliberately celebrating the African culture. It’s a cradle of the African performance system with all its beliefs and worldview embedded in it, and we just had fun and many discussions. And the performance was well received, because the performance was supposed to serve as a methodology where we get information from the audience, and the responses clearly reveal that Soyinka is quintessentially an ambassador of the African tradition and worldview and African performance style.”
Ifatimehin also spoke on the directiorial, experimental approach that motivated some of the extensions and modifications he made while staging the play, when he said, “we tried as much as possible to engage other surpluses. We created an entire scene to show how much that meant to the community. That bride in Soyinka’s play didn’t say anything from the beginning to the end of the play, but we gave her a voice. She was married, disvirgined, and widowed in one night, so why isn’t she at the centre of the story? We experimented and pursued different angles from the text.”
For Adefila, binary or counter-authority plays important roles in understanding Soyinka when he spoke about his experience performing Soyinka’s works, noting, “From my own experience in the past two years, we have staged Kongi’s Harvest, Trials of Brother Jero, and The Swamp Dwellers, which is the latest we are working on, and I see that Soyinka has found a complex way of placing opposites side by side. So, for every authority, there is a counter-authority, and his rebellious nature can be seen in his works.
“Soyinka doesn’t submit to totalitarian authority. There’s always a balance, and he doesn’t paint any of his characters as complete or flawless. You will always find some flaws in the characters, and that is what has made his works so admirable to me. For anybody to engage Soyinka, you must be adventurous and open-minded, and this shows your vulnerability as a performer, because you are going into a forest of languages and imagery. So, your appreciation of poetry and cultural background will come to the fore. The first thing to do is to understand the culture that has produced him, and then understand the ethos and norms of that culture. There are moments where you understand, but can’t explain what he’s saying, and at that moment, I use dance to translate the message.”
A spectacularly thrilling moment was when Adefila collaborated with some Israelis performers to stage Trials of Brother Jero in Hebrew and English, saying, “It was an amazing experience staging the plays of Wole Soyinka that people don’t want to stage. I went with a group of Israelis to stage this play, and they made a Jewish translation of it and also brought it to Nigeria to perform. During the performance, some actors spoke Hebrew and some spoke English. Soyinka is Nigerian, and we have found it difficult translating his plays in our local dialect, but the Israelis were able to do that in Hebrew. You need to be hungry for his works to be able to do something like that. We need to look at it like we are dealing with poetry, for people to engage, so they don’t get carried away, and the audience is forced to pay attention to whatever the actors are saying.”
“I had the privilege of playing Brother Jero in 1978 at the University of Lagos,” recalled Prof. Oni who also shared his encounter with Soyinka and his works. “I remember we created some memorable scenes using lights which made it seem like ‘Brother Jero’ was going to heaven. My engagement with Soyinka must be over five decades, because I visited the prison where he was as a secondary school student and asked to see him, and the officers I met there told me that he wasn’t allowed to receive visitors, because he was in solitary confinement. There have been lots of events in honour of Wole Soyinka, and I want to congratulate NAPTAP for this.
“I had a chance to meet his wife, and she gave me a copy of The Man Died to read overnight and return it the following morning, because I could be arrested if it was found on me. I read the book that night and returned it to her the following morning, and when she saw me, she said she was joking, and that I could return the book anytime I liked, but I told her I had finished it and she was surprised. Soyinka has survived 90 years, and has written novels, plays, and poetry, and he recently wrote a new play. We congratulate him and NANTAP for a job well done.”
Adimora-Ezeigbo recalled her almost lifetime encounter with Wole Soyinka, as a writer she has always admired since she was in secondary school, noting, “I also found myself teaching him at UNILAG, and I also used some of his works in my Ph.D thesis. From his works, I learnt a lot about the Yoruba culture. I’ve also enjoyed the unique and amazing way he interpreted the human condition. I also taught and studied his poetry. He has a universal appeal that makes him sought-after everywhere.”
A scene from BAP Production of Death and the King’s Horseman
Real or imagined: Soyink’s creative obscurantism
IFATIMEHIN does not subscribe to the usual difficulty lamentation many ascribe to Soyinka’s works, noting, “Of course, people argue that his plays are very difficult, but I doubt if we have any complexity in terms of understanding. It’s a bit of fallacy to say that his plays are difficult. They may be complex for those who may not have a basic understanding of the scope. Soyinka’s works are like riddles deep in kernels of hot embers, and one has to be really bold to dip his hands into it. We need to be bold enough to consume his works.”
For Prof. Liman, there are several levels to studying Soyinka’s aesthetics, noting that “it’s not easy to study his works, and he doesn’t plan to stop producing plays. The idea of being hungry is the greatest factor to use in understanding his plays and what they mean. The plays I find interesting are the ones where the directors go in-depth into the works, and you see that Soyinka is not so easy. I think this complexity is the reason why we are still celebrating him, and so I’d like to say thanks to NANTAP and to my colleagues for celebrating him.
As someone who acted in Soyinka’s plays and also critiqued them in the media, Anikulapo described Soyinka as very approachable and debunked claims of difficulty in his work, saying hsi works shouldn’t be equated with mathematics, so as not to scare young critics and literary enthusiasts away.
“I think you need to understand the background of the writer or subtext before you get to know him,” he said. “You would need to study his scripts for a long time, to understand what you are saying, not just jumping on stage and pouring out the lines. You need to take everything into consideration before you approach his plays, so you don’t scare people away from them.”
But Prof. Liman countered this saying, “I don’t think academics try to scare students from Soyinka. If you have a hunger for his works, it becomes easy for you. I am an academic, and I don’t tell my students that Soyinka is difficult, neither do I tell them he is easy as well. As a student, you have to go in-depth to understand his works.”
“With the kind of relationship I’ve been privileged to have with him, I conclude that he has so many levels to how you can interpret his works,” Adeniran submitted. “His works are tasking, but he is not difficult. He is very approachable and you would enjoy a discussion with him. To do his kind of plays, you must be ready to decode the Yoruba poetry he’s throwing at you in English. To direct a play, you must know a bit of the writer. The director needs to ensure the audience understands the play. In most of the plays, he’s opening layers of arguments in front of you. Don’t go near Soyinka unless you are willing to explore.”
Soyinka and women
ON the role women play in Soyinka’s plays, whether passive in keeping with patriarchial dictates or active, as custodians of society, Prof. Liman said, “I would like to see more roles being played by women and how they are portrayed. The Iyaloja’s role is to make sure tradition is kept. We know Soyinka is patriarchal, but from my personal interaction with his plays, I think the role of women is not strong enough.”
But Adefila did not agree, saying, “I attended a seminar where someone compared Prof. Femi Osofisan’s works to Soyinka’s. Soyinka’s works isn’t just a hard nut to crack, but you must be a stoic student or an enthusiast in literature to understand his works. I do not agree that his works are easy to understand. For the role of women, Soyinka might be masculine, but he has never downplayed the role of women.”
And for Jaiyesimi, Soyinka is very deep, and from what her experience of his works, it’s difficult to bringhSoyinka’s plays to the stage without understanding his culture. “Most of his works contain paradoxes, and they address basic issues we have in the community, and bring out amassed wisdom. In terms of women, there’s a very dominant, strong woman, and you see the strength of their character and you see how he uses them to portray the culture, because as we know, the women were the custodians of culture at the time.”
Soyinka and education in Nigeria
WRITER and journalist Ajeluorou said discussions around Soyinka exemplify the dysfunctionality so prevalent in the Nigerian society, especially in the area of education. He explained the different narrative and stylistic approaches of Chinua Achebe and Soyinka, noting, “Discussions around Soyinka are always interesting, and I’ve listened to the arguments all along, and it has been quite fascinating. If you look at Achebe and Soyinka, for instance, Achebe was trying to explain our society to both us, who are in it, and the outsiders, so he probably needed to invent a language that would make others understand what he was saying, or what we are about as Africans as a whole, and what our societies were, and the transitions that were going on from the old to the point where the colonial experience started, and then to the modern society that we are today.
“But Soyinka didn’t take that route. Instead, he was deeply enmeshed in it. He didn’t feel that he owed anybody any explanation. You needed to be immersed in the Africa that he knew and try as much as possible to understand it. That was why his poetry is more like a priest presiding in the shrine. He doesn’t have to explain the rituals because he took for granted that everybody around should know them, if you are truly a member of the society. So he didn’t feel like he owed anybody that kind of explanation, but he went straight into the rituals, and so you have a lot of ritual imageries.
“If you go to our local communities and listen to elders and even the priests and priestesses presiding in their various shrines and commune, that is the kind of language you will hear. You needed to be able to understand it because that is your language, social setting and religious experience. This takes me also to the way our education is structured, which Soyinka, some years back, decided not to teach in Nigerian universities, when he said he didn’t want to teach illiterates, which is unfortunate. What that means is that our education has regressed terribly, and we need to address it.
“Even at 90, he still teaches at foreign universities, now in Abu Dhabi. What does that say? It means that our education is just nowhere at the moment. I listened to the JAMB Registrar Prof. Ishaq Oloyede and some vice chancellors just a few days ago, in their meeting to decide cut-off points for JAMB, and professors were advocating a cut-off of 100 out of 400 possible score, and they later settled for 140 out of 400. Polytechnics 100, and some were even saying it should be 80 out of 400. Students who enter universities with that kind of score, how do you want them to engage Soyinka, for instance? This is the dilemma we are in.”
Ehi Braimah, Femi Odugbemi, Sola Adeyemi, Sam Uche Anyamele, Aderemi Adegbite, Prof. Kunle Adeyemi, Toritseju (Oxygen) Ejoh and Efe Paul Azino were among other culture personalities that took part of in the ‘Staging Wole Soyinka’ colloquium, perhaps the last event since June designed to mark his 90th birthday.
‘Staging Wole Soyinka’: To engage his works, you must be adventurous, open-minded
