Adaptation & the Theme of Passage of Time in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka & Ola Rotimi

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Two factors common to the dramaturgy of Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi are experimentation with adaptation, which is a fact of life and valid artistic practice, and attraction to the people's conflictual engagement with the colonial process. These factors, which are aspects of compositional elements in literary productions, enable these two playwrights not only to celebrate and promote intertextuality, but also to illustrate how certain universal beliefs and consciousness such as fate, free will and the consequences of human choices, can be given local flavour, and how the idea of the passage of time can be mediated through cultural contact.

It is pertinent to state that, apart from using their adapted plays The Bacchae of Euripides and The Gods Are Not to Blame to establish the nexus between imperial Greece and Yoruba culture, Soyinka and Rotimi employed these texts and those that examined conflictual engagement with the colonial history namely Death and the King's Horseman, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi and Kurunmi to reflect on the postcolonial Nigerian political landscape marked by oppressive regimes, violence and instability. Absolutism and ethnicism, which underscore the characters of Pentheus, Odewale, Oba Ovonramwen and Kurunmi, also undermine Nigerian postcolonial history. The Nigerian political environment from 1960-65 was marred by intolerable ethnic sentiments, which led to the 1966 military coups, the Civil War and military take over. Nevertheless, the leadership tussle within the military itself and the several democratic experiments that followed remind one of the Homeric battlefield as captured in the The Bacchae of Euripides.

ADAPTATIONS OF GREEK TRAGEDIES

Adaptation is one way in which new texts can benefit from old ones and in which creative norms transcend historical boundaries. It is not merely a translation or reproduction of an existing work, but a creative act of borrowing some bones and flesh of an old text and mixing them in the crucible of art, in such a way that what is produced bears the signature of the artistic vision of the new author, as well as experience that is meaningful to the new audience or reader. Romanus Muoneke posits that ‘[t]he reader or audience of any adapted work should not only get a feel of the old story but must also recognize a new orientation and insight’ (‘Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: The Gods Are Not to Blame and The Bacchae of Euripides’: 3).