Figures in a Dance: The Theatre of W. B. Yeats and Wole Soyinka (review)

Hardly any comparative work has been done on W. B. Yeats and Wole Soyinka, in spite of every encouragement offered by Soyinka's own history as student, playwright, and critic. Soyinka's links with A. Norman Jeffares and (more importantly) with G. Wilson Knight (Akporji speaks of the "Nietzschean Nexus" [61]) would long have suggested such a connection; as would Soyinka's gestures towards myth criticism in his Cambridge lectures (see Myth and the African World). Nothing is in print, as far as I can tell, besides A. Thomas Cavano's recent article on the Cuchulain/Elesin prototype (2002); but even that is primarily concerned with documenting broad mythic parallels (see also Cavano, "Death and Pagan Heroes in the Twentieth Century" [1999]). Chii Akporji's Figures in a Dance, is, therefore, very welcome as the first book-length introduction to the subject. This is not a study of Yeats's "influence" on Soyinka, but rather an examination of parallels between them. Akporji's Yeats and Soyinka live in separate but comparable universes, and are connected over time and space only by their interest in the same mythic themes and dramatic styles—and by "History" understood in the apocalyptic sense. (A rather uncomplicated "Interpenetrating Gyre" [150] and a "Mobius Strip" [152] are included). The parallels are made both interesting and problematic by the different paths that the careers of the two Nobel Laureate took, the place and sequence of the plays in their total oeuvre, and the history of theater conventions in their various epochs.

Chapter 1 of Figures is an abbreviated examination of the social conditions that shaped Yeats's and Soyinka's revolutionary theaters. Chapter 2 argues for the necessity of myth for both writers: how, starting with their early poetry and prose, both of them develop the idea of an appropriate theater that would lend "itself to the effective manipulation of indigenous culture to the expression of their consciousness" (45). Chapters 3–5 deal with the dramatists' early, middle, and late periods. The suggestion throughout is of a natural, almost inevitable, development for both writers from the search for a format in the early plays, past the re-enactment of the ritual death of heroes in the middle period, to the more complex representation of "history" in the "War" plays.

The argument is neat, as a general proposition. In detail, however, there are problems in finding exact equivalents, since there are none. Nowhere in Soyinka's work, for example, can we find equivalents for the physical, mystical, and mythic "landscapes" of Yeats's middle years. The "forest" in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests, however profound as a repository of the unknown, is no equivalent as a national landscape of mythological interest comparable to Yeats's Cro-Patrick mountain or his Killala beach (70–72). Nor, if the matter is pressed, could Soynka's Dance serve the same patriotic political function in the anti-colonial sense as Yeats's plays of the equivalent period.

But here, as elsewhere in the book, Akporji brings up very interesting parallels, as for example, between Cathleen's "goodness of heart and Demoke's "new awakening" (87–88; 96). As might be expected, Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and On Baile's Strand andSoyinka's The Road and Death and the King's Horseman are central texts in ch. 4, which compares Soyinka's dramatization of Ogun rituals with Yeats's treatment of Cuchulain, the Irish hero-god. But it is in chapter 6 ("The Dramaturgy of Dance") that Akporji looks at the formal elements of technique employed by these playwrights (play structure; use of chorus; flash-backs; setting and duration; and song, dance, and music itself) and makes some of her most specific observations about Soyinka's work, in contrast to Yeats's.

Drama lends itself easily and well to Akporji's approach. Her manner is often unavoidably synoptic...