The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy by Astrid Van Weyenberg (review)

Adaptation studies is a rapidly expanding field, and Astrid Van Weyenberg’s thought-provoking new work pushes us to think more broadly about adaptations as complex responses not only to adapted texts, but also to adaptation contexts. Pressing scholars to take a broad view of the term politics, she supports her arguments with detailed examinations of the political engagements of contemporary African adaptations of Greek tragedies. Van Weyenberg argues that these adaptations engage with a multitude of politics: responding to adapted Greek texts, histories of colonialism (including cultural and historical narratives that brought Greek drama from Europe to Africa as part of the colonial project), issues facing contemporary African nations and peoples, and theories about tragedy as a genre. She also argues that the complex interplay among multiple source texts undermines the implicit genealogy of adaptation, both producing contemporary texts with diverse parents and reflecting back to bring adapted material to light in new ways.

In her introduction, Van Weyenberg dexterously raises and questions various ideas generally held by adaptation theorists, the ostensible connection between classical Greece and Western culture, and narratives that separate African culture from both Greece and the West. This introduction consistently responds to Kevin Wetmore Jr.’s The Athenian Sun in the African Sky and Black Dionysus, building on and complicating Wetmore’s work. Van Weyenberg is centrally concerned with moving beyond Eurocentric narratives in as many ways as possible, pushing instead to see every component of these adaptations as multifaceted, a project that she builds through four individual chapters, focusing on one or two plays each.

Her insightful first chapter examines two versions of the Antigone story that confront traditional notions of Greek culture as inherently and, more importantly, exclusively Western. After a brief though useful account of Antigone’s history in Western philosophy and politics, Van Weyenberg looks at Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni and Athol Fugard’s The Island as responses to their own political and sociocultural contexts—postcolonial Nigeria and apartheid South Africa, respectively. In these plays, Van Weyenberg shows, a politicized Antigone opens the way for a liberatory politics. She argues that “Fugard and Osofisan engage with Sophocles’ classic not to counter it, but to adopt the figure of Antigone as a political symbol. . . . Their main concern is with her political potential in the present” (36). This contemporary political potential complicates and rejects Western claims to a cultural ownership of Antigone as she becomes an African political figure (without losing her Hellenistic heritage).

The second chapter draws particularly on the work of René Girard and Victor Turner to analyze the revolutionary political power of ritual in Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. Soyinka’s play changes the political import of the Dionysian rites from Euripides, imbuing them with the power to be politically liberating for the oppressed community to purge itself of the oppressive Pentheus. As Van Weyenberg argues, “[t]he community can only be saved by expelling what threatens it most. Pentheus has to die, but his death has to be performed ritually for it to have a political effect” (68). Van Weyenberg goes beyond standard readings of Soyinka to suggest that the play confronts with hope the fated or cyclical inevitability of Western tragedy as a genre (drawing on Aristotle and Girard) and envisions a renewed community perhaps freed of violence, instead of the cycle of ritualized violence perpetuated by Pentheus.

In the third chapter, “Staging Transition,” Van Weyenberg focuses largely on the theatricality and problems of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by examining how two plays performatively respond to and critique the commission. Yael Farber’s Molora and Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise—adaptations of the Oresteia—adopt, Van Weyenberg argues, theatrical devices from the TRC such as testimony, communal witnessing, and the ethics of amnesty and public forgiveness. But this adoption is often used to critique the problems of the TRC, including assumptions...