Soyinka, Wole (Vol. 179) - James Gibbs (review date summer 1996)

James Gibbs (review date summer 1996)

SOURCE: Gibbs, James. Review of The Beatification of Area Boy, by Wole Soyinka. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 750-51.

[In the following review, Gibbs commends the “musical elements” in The Beatification of Area Boy but asserts that the play's conclusion is its “weakest point.”]

The Beatification of Area Boy opened in Leeds, on the day that Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were sentenced to death by a tribunal in Port Harcourt. Ten days into the run, the gruesome details of the execution of the Ogoni 9 broke on the world. While hinting at this kind of state violence in his play, Wole Soyinka has, generally, avoided the heavy-handed satire of such earlier works as A Play of Giants, creating a text that relies more heavily on music than anything he has written since Opera Wonyosi.

The play begins with a “red sky in the morning” that...

[The entire page is 656 words long]

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