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

After encountering Isidore Okpewho's essay "Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire" (in RAL 30.4: 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 reaction to the source text through the lens of Okpewho's critical eyes. This kind of comparative reading entails unraveling a dense web of intertextuality 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 of the Royal Court Theater managed to have a young playwright's dream fulfilled: full-scale productions of The Swamp Dwellers 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 savvy move since Soyinka had proven his "prowess" as an anglophone African playwright whose theater met Eurocentric standards but relied on Afrocentric aesthetics and sensibility and, therefore, his adaptation would enhance the theater's experimental agenda. Finally, as a dramaturg I have explored Soyinka's adaptation of The Bacchae as it would be seen in production more than as a literary appropriation of Euripides's play that reflects the playwright's Nigerian roots. It is a series of physical as well as verbal responses to its source text where Soyinka's choice of setting and stage directions, inserted bits of stage business, alteration of the make-up and role of the chorus are as dependent upon contemporary performance modes and uses of space as upon his desire to create a play that is as relevant to its current audience as it was for a Greek audience in the fifth century BCE.

Okpewho concludes the following: "While Soyinka may be a broad-based humanist who explores the common ties that bind the human race, he is primarily a nativist in the sense of seeing his indigenous culture as the starting point of any such universalist gestures" (51). He convincingly shows why Soyinka found a soulmate in Euripides and then used the adaptation as a way to elucidate the political, social, and economic climate of fifth-century imperialistic Athens that Euripides himself may have had to underplay. He also points out intercultural penetrations where Ogun and Dionysos merge and at the same time are differentiated, a fact that is substantiated by Soyinka's use of oriki praise songs and passages from his poem "Idanre." Finally, Okpewho makes a very powerful argument about Soyinka's "parochializing strategies" or "counter-hegemonic moves" that center his adaptation in Yoruba culture and politics (38). These are readily seen in the charnel house image of skeletal remains reminiscent of the gladiatorial spectacle of mass executions that took place on Bar Beach during the aftermath of the Biafran civil war. They are also prevalent in the attitudes of both rulers, Pentheus and Kadmos, who could be echoing the sentiments of Nigeria's military leaders from whom Soyinka had fled. In responding to his essay, I cannot but agree with this conclusion that Soyinka's syncretism is grounded in a challenge to the dictatorial excesses of the...