The Beatification Of Area Boy. Wole Soyinka.
A four-person combo on a raised platform onstage plays infectious African jazz music as the audience takes their seats. Behind this combo, towering grey concrete walls rise upward and out of sight. There is no sky. To the right, a dirty alleyway, and further right, at an angle, the cold concrete façade of "La Plaza," a modern shopping center. Judge, the play's vatic figure, lies face down on the landing of the front steps leading to this center, the highest point on stage. Judge's apostrophe to the unusually bright morning opens the play on a hopeful note, but by the end, the brightness is revealed to have been a sign of great catastrophe -- the sacking and burning of the Maroko shantytown and expulsion of its one million inhabitants.
The Lagosians in Wole Soyinka's latest play, The Beatification of Area Boy (subtitled "A Lagosian Kaleidoscope"), speak, sing, and dance their alienation from a city/world in which they live physically but
from which they are exiled spiritually. These elegiac-nostalgic songs and dances are, in fact, the key elements in the play, far outweighing its rather small and belated kernel of drama. In addition to the African jazz combo, a blind minstrel punctuates several events with simple but powerful guitar music and singing.
On this score, The Beatification of Area Boy is an example of static, ritualistic drama, an extended exposition of alienated and plaintive existence in a postcolonial and posttraditional world. In such a world, modern conditions co-exist with premodern, ethnic, and traditional ones. The play's central figures are the Barber, who is superstitious to a fault; the Trader, who is naive and ignorant; Mama Put, a "chop-bar" operator, who seems all heart and bile; and the mad, disbarred lawyer (Judge), who believes that his prayers influence the morning sun. The distance between affluent and poor in this play is captured in the stark contrast between the towering modern shopping center -- with its sharp concrete steps and cold clear glass doors -- and dirty, pot-holed, low-lying areas in which the Barber, Trader, and Mama Put ply their trades and bemoan their fate.
The single exception to this pathetic cast of characters, who otherwise lack a profound understanding of their plight, is Sanda -- a university drop-out, "La Plaza" security guard, and leader of the Area Boys -- played with great, if sometimes excessive, cockiness and suavity by Femi Elufowoju, Jr. Sanda alone seems to understand the situation in both Lagos and Nigeria as a whole. As he explains to his old flame, Miseyi, he had dropped out of university, one year short of graduating, because as a security officer he earns many times the salary of a college graduate. Sanda is astute, even cunning, and the play takes great pains to set him and the Lagos Area Boys he represents apart from the other criminals that are satirized and demonized. He is presented as a figure of counter-culture, a better version of free enterprise, and so on. But Sanda's version of free enterprise nevertheless perpetuates the criminal culture and mentality that plagues such communities.
Near the beginning of the play, Sanda calls Mama Put "some kind of Mother Courage . . . even down to the superstitiuous bit." Sanda is wrong, however. He, not Mama Put, is the "Mother Courage" of Area Boy: he is the one who makes other people rob and cheat while providing himself with a shield of distance and deniability. In the end, even the money for his own flight and relocation comes not from anything he does, but rather from Miseyi's rejection of her wealthy fiancé.
The play's songs, music, and dance were engaging and infectious, with the minstrel's simple guitar songs, ably played by Tunji Oyelana, effectively underscoring both fundamental moods and moral perspectives. With the exception of Denise Orita, whose playing of Mama Put was grating and one-dimensional, the performers provided an excellent sense of the dominant accents...
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