Tag: Pyrates

I attended the event to see Wole Soyinka’s new play, Wheels of Justice, but it turned out to be part of the anniversary of the Pyrate Confraternity, also known as the Seadogs. Soyinka joined via zoom from the UAE where he performs his new tour as teacher and writer. He baffles even at 89 with his fecundity. He tackled questions before the play animated the stage. The organisers ambushed me to propound a question, but someone else asked an intriguing question afterwards about the image of the group. The questioner did not vocalise it but, at the background of the query, was an incident during the election campaigns. Some young men, decked in black, emoted a song of verbal extremism about the extremities of the then APC candidate, now president. Soyinka had condemned that delinquent theatre.

He did not refer to it at this event but he said the Pyrates had a robust process of dealing with bad eggs among them. I wonder if those involved in that campaign act were punished? I asked him to interrogate the notion that a play is eternal and a novel frozen. Stage production improves a drama. The novel, once published, is finished. I thought it was too blanket a statement. A play can be changed by a director even a year or 10 years later. By the same token, the novel’s own changes can happen not on stage but in the imagination. The reader continues to recast and even distort a novel. I referred to his novel The Interpreters that can enjoy interpretations even a century later. Dan Brown’s Dan Vinci Code is written as fiction but read by many as non-fiction.

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I think Soyinka’s response stuck to the playwright’s advantage in tinkering with his work. I would have wanted to even add that, though rare, novelists have had to change parts of their published novels. Femi Macaulay reminded me of Achebe’s Arrow of God. I also rewrote my Crocodile Girl. Sometimes editors revise aspects of the work. For instance, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has undergone some changes to defrock it of racist tropes. The n-word was expunged in some editions. But Soyinka the bard, as always, did well to raise questions about the literary arts, his forte.

The play, directed with flair by Tunde Awosanmi, traces the origins of the Pyrates as a counter-culture phenom. Striking was the dynamic between the starry-eyed Soyinka as a student and today’s Soyinka the star. It is a bit surreal but the production shies from mirroring some chasm between old and young. Both idealisms remain, the old Soyinka not changed from the young. It is a flawed bildungsroman. It’s Soyinka’s play in which Soyinka is a character, like Tennessee Williams in Glass Menagerie. But the play thrives hilariously as it tracks the birth of the Pyrates with Nigeria’s history up till today, its political trappings, turbulence, chicanery and the class, tribal and religious follies. The play is a pageant of songs, dances and costume, bringing lots of laughs and grimaces, the highlight being castrated justice where a Fayose character with a neck brace appears on a hospital bed wheeled into the courtroom to show why his case cannot be held. It becomes a metaphor for capsized justice in our history. The play is perhaps one of the subtle projects in burnishing a group feared by quite a few Nigerians as a malevolent cult. But here Soyinka makes it a critic of a decadent society.