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.Lawyer, poet an playwright, Fred Agbeyegbe was 76 on Friday. The Lagos chapter of the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, NANTAP, set up a party in his honour with the staging of one of his plays, BUDISO, which he wrote and produced in 1986 to mark 100 years of the legal profession in Nigeria. The celebration billed for next weekend, ought to have happened last year to commemorate his 75th birthday anniverssary but had to be postponed till this year. In this piece, poet, theatre director and broadcaster, Jide Ogungbade, who directed Agbeyegbe’s plays in the 80s under Ajo Productions Company, examines the essences of Agbeyegbe’s plays.?The essay was originaly written for inclusion in the book of tributes, The Playwright and His Ideology: A Celebration of Fred Agbeyegbe, which will also be launched next week as part of the birthday commemoration.
The artistic ideology of any writer can be formally gleaned from the force of vision of society and individuals that is represented as the final positioning of the characters’ vision in subsequent and recurrent creative exercises (plays, novels, poems).
It is the intangible but stormy repetitions of the writer’s conclusions on conflicts as championed by characters who deepen or resolve such conflicts to emphasise their individual character reactions to other characters in the play and to the world around them.
It is the aggregate positioning of the writer’s vision, which we can deduce from his handling of social realities, events and history in continuing revelations through creative exercises (plays, poems, novels). An observation of a writer’s artistic ideology cut across aesthetic world of each play or work to show strains of vision despite the different thematic and internal aesthetic logic of each work of the writer.
It is the hammer and anvil of the writer’s workshop with which he shapes and casts his messages to us, the audience. Such mould may come to us in the pervading temperament of each work — in tragic, comic, serious and serio-comic (a combination of both serious and comic) or farcical modes of enunciation.
Fred Agbeyegbe comes to us through his work as a sphinx who glides from tragic through to comic and sometimes farcical modes in a single play. A fact more pronounced in his satiric piece, The King Must Dance Naked. He is essentially a writer who writes in the “serio-comic” dramaturgical tradition. This is the emotional fibre that affects most of his works — he makes you cry even as he makes you laugh. He is a serious analyst who enjoys “living” in the theatre of ideas like the world of Bernard Shaw’s characters. He is an expressionistic writer, whose major terrain is social realism by way of form, following the western example of Ibsen and the post modern typology of caustic and ‘hurting’ realism, which we find in the works of a Femi Osofisan, despite differences in visions of the writers.
Agbeyegbe’s realism dissects the society at the significant arteries of the common man on the street, his pains, woes, love, death and pressures around him that keeps him where he is: In the puddle of self-realisable but sometimes unfulfilled dreams. The vision of common man in characters who bear their worldviews to us as they see it and not as we see it, is the epicentre of expressionistic dramaturgy wherein Fred’s workshop situate.
It is not enough to call him a realist for he compliments his realism with transmogrification of human debates into the realm of man versus the superhuman or supernatural. So important is the idea peddling in Fred’s plays that he sometimes creates characters who are neither man nor god. “Nondescript” sub-lunary elements given the voice of the author.
Visionary Strains:
It is dangerous to read Fred Agbeyegbe’s plays which are set in the background clothing of traditional African period experiences without an armour to ward-off conflicts of contemporary social realities of the period of his writing. Perhaps, it is in this milieu that we can posit his major artistic ideological concern in interpreting man in his ontological and existential being as well as in his bid to transcend strictures imposed upon him by society, tradition and taboos, as he apprehends new challenges of an ever-changing world: A world of million answers looking hard at their questions in the restrictive barbed-wires of supernatural impositions, imperial hubris and contemporary tyrants.
The King Must Dance Naked, Woe Unto Death; The Last Omen, My grandfather’s ghost — all these plays testify to the active ingredients of challenges and forces of restriction which impede on the positive movement of the individual and society towards liberation, equity, justice and fair play.
In the afore-mentioned plays, there is no outright rejection of tradition and the existence of supernatural forces in the affairs of men, what we find is a rejection of sit-tight-rulers and public opinion moulders who are opportunists.
The King... as evidenced in Mejebi’s final show-down with royal lies to cover imperial hubris. Similarly, Woe Unto Death probes through human interactions into supernatural suppositions and phenomena to expose the big fight between man and his existential problems. Common-Cold, Death, Old Age become metaphors of states of man’s psychological restrictions as he battles to reach destined goals, and master the problems of his environment. Egwuaruna in Woe... epitomises the undying spirit of man to challenge and if possible transcend the forces that nail him to pre-destined destruction.
In no play of Agbeyegbe is the quest for post-mordernism in confrontation with apriori laws of human existence in traditions and imperial successions — more pronounced than The Last Omen.” Here, in this play, the last bastion of restrictive traditional oligarchies is broken by the undying spirit of Demeyin’s philosophical and scientific superiority: says, the people “we want a republic of ideas of resolution”. We are in confrontation, once more, in another play, with man, fighting the forces of destiny imposed on him as is evidenced in Demeyin’s rising from the coffin and declaring in a revolutionary spirit that “I won”!
In Human Cargo, the archetype of man’s inhumanity to man and brother-on-brother violence is visited in a very incredible flashback which links this lust for cannibalism in man from slavery through to post-modern times. Here, the freedom that the writer champions is that of the down-trodden man, trying to eke out a living, trying out his hands with little wherewithal and largely misused and misunderstood by society.
No doubt, the indomitable essence of destiny is an ever present reality in Agbeyegbe’s plays. However, it is his treatment of destiny factors that attracts attention. There is a penchant for refusal of destined fate by his characters but which often ends in self assertion (Mejebi in King) or re-instatement of the sanctity of tradition before the pollution of ethics, mores and continuity by self seeking aristocratic opinion moulders as we find in My Grandfather’s Ghost.
This play is a re-validation of Agbeyegbe’s strong conviction about the need for the future to redeem itself with the virtues inherent in tradition and move on to higher planes of contemporary significance in love, brotherhood, sacrifice, equality and justice: “I bequeath you this kingdom, its wealth and domain..... What I have done is not only my wish but also ... re-enactment of God’s will hitherto bastardised by human folly” . Alas for a profound aggressor of the frontiers of the gods in thematic concerns, the writer betrays a visionary feeling towards the existence of a supreme deity whose ways to man is just, despite man’s manipulation of his purposes — a visionary statement on artistic ideology no doubt.
It can be assumed that Agbeyegbe’s canvas of creative engagement in socially relevant stories cut across the backdrop of analysis in form of royal or regal characterisation of traditional mien, straight into extended satiric statements of the contemporary world outside the play. The history of post-independent Nigeria and military hegemonists’ hold on the polity between seventies and eighties is not a myth in the sit-tight-and-quit-by-the-barrel-syndrome of rulers. So is the apathy of the people in traumatised social climate of this period. Evidences of the concern for this period shore up in the writer’s engagement of a play like The King... wherein the narrator legislates his story’s canvas, naming it “Once upon a remote and present time”.
The audience is immediately intimated about an emergency aesthetic landing at strange ports which the play is filled with. Myth, history and contemporary realities in extracted quantities become the instruments with which Agbeyegbe delineates his characters. These characters break the bound of period costumes and traditionally upheld diplomacy to address us and hurt our wounds where it pains most with extended satire.
Listen to Ogodobiri, the prime-minister in The King...: “How does a man rule a people who never come to complain about their problems or when they do, complain about unreal problems like food, clothing and white collar jobs.” The apathy of the people as observed tongue-in-cheek by Ogodobiri is a reflection of the 80s coming from bites of neo-colonialism into bad leadership and consequently coasting home on military dictatorship reduced the people’s zest for group survival, while increasing the quantum of risks individuals were ready to take to insure self-survival. On the social plane, apathy ruled as we had two governments: one for the people, however apathetic and one for the government, however coercive.
Omajuwa in the height of tyranny claims “when trees fall upon trees, we simply carve out another route.” This selfish end to leadership and lack of concern for the good and well being of the polity is the major exploratory canvas of The King... cutting across traditional, myth-history realities into contemporary life in deliberate multi-dimensional characterisation.
There is a contemporary side to Omajuwa and Ogodobiri’s characterisation, rich as both characters are made as epic or mythical characters. Omajuwa says, “Where are the chiefs gone? Far into the naira market, leaving the palace empty. Now there is no rain and they yap! yap!! yap!!!” This statement is an extended satire on contemporary law and opinion moulders in their get-rich-quick-mania of the first and second Republic of Nigeria’s post independent polity, a situation which bred financially rich social “monsters” who fed on the purse of the people while stowing money away in foreign banks, leaving the business of real governance to wayfarers. With the characterisation of Atseburuku in his pedigree role of traitor as claimed by Omajuwa, we have an insight into the activities of greedy politicians who fuelled the slave trade and continue in post independent Nigeria to engage in illegal exchanges which impoverish the polity.
Ogodobiri (P.II). captures the picture of a polity kept at zero movement towards progress in his statement “It is all a useless rat race”.
The character Omajuwa as a king champions contemporary African leaders who do not believe in the myth of patrimony or ethos of group-survival, but who sit tight and fuel loyalty among the people to stay in power.
The bulk of The King Must Dance Naked addresses the sit-tight-syndrome of African leaders who are jittery of loosing power. Omajuwa gives Ogodobiri, the prime minister the power to go into public and build an undeserving image of a god for her to showcase good leadership so as to stay longer in illegitimate power holding.
Suffice it is to say that the writer straddles over time and myths and contemporary realities to create characters who can carry in their dialogue and conflicts, the great debate about traditional continuities in the evident face of inevitable changes and contemporary observations of the need or malformations of such changes in the life of the people.
Dramaturgical tradition:
Taking a hindsight at the history of forms in modern theatre literature, we can position social realism as a movement inaugurated by Ibsen, continued by Chekov, Strindberg and Shaw in historical gestation. Central to this artistic ideology is the nature of the dialogue of the characters.
The dialogue is often realistic. The characters’ emotional problems, means of livelihood and behaviour are often typically realistic strains of drama. The pursuit of the success of the individual in society had been the thematic concern of Ibsen (noted as the father of realism). Arthur Miller as exemplified by his “Death of a salesman”.
Strains of realism breaks easily through works of African writers of the dramatic genre in plays that seek to intervene into the anguish of the common-man-on-the-street.
Femi Osofisan’s works are rich in strains of reality which takes along with it the re-interpretation of the world around the character, from the character’s point of view. Such views may not be ours but they open Pandora boxes of the writer’s visionary intentions.
There is a great deal of expressionism in Agbeyegbe’s plays. Expressionistic writers attempt the dramatisation of a subjective picture of reality as is believed and enunciated by the individual character’s consciousness. In this case, the way the character interprets the reality of our mutually lived experiences.
From the epicentre of Agbeyegbe’s aesthetic world, repetitive writing of certain character strains in their unusual perception of the world around them is a structural indication of the writer’s vision of the society. A dose of the character Mejebi (The King...), a tempest-laden whiff of Odosun in (The King...) and Egwuaruna in Woe, a loquacious and unrelenting fighting spirit of Demeyin in The Last Omen are all pointers to the vision of Agbeyegbe.
These characters are very unusual in their revolutionary spirits and they all dare destiny. They reject traditional structures and insist on new ways of doing things. Agbeyegbe’s vision no doubt reflects the anguish and conflicts of the individual with society and the same anguish (internal conflict) within each character as they rationalise their states of being through unusual reactions to publicly accepted stereo-type opinions about issues, events, people and tradition.
Fred Agbeyegbe is a writer who apprehends social conflicts through a deep concern for the anguish of the individuals who are trapped in the pit-holes dug by tradition and wide public acceptances on the one hand. He also signifies individuals whose fate happens to be the result of their psychological make-up or internal conflicts. The character of Lucille “Michael/Randy” in her frustrated consciousness and walking-stick choice of prostitution conjures another strain of Agbeyegbe’s characters in their heroic confrontation with unyielding forces.
Form application in Theatre:
Fred Agbeyegbe’s can be situated in the experimental Theatre tradition. His legacy spans from western traditional forms into the folk theatre and epic constants of African origin. His poetic consciousness in versified liturgies, however hidden, is a pointer to an African worldview approach to the use of conceits in parables, allegories and myths.
His borrowing of the Greeko-Roman classical tradition of aesthetics in the presentation of the chorus in The King... reminds of The Bacchae of Euripides in the use of chorus as participating commentators in the cosmic fate of the people in a troubled state.
He employs metaphoric, symbolic and archetypal characters whose relevance in the conflict of the plays draws attention not only to their positions vis-a-vis other characters in conflict. We are also drawn towards these characters as human capsules and commentators on the world history of power drunkenness, accountability and sheer penchant of man towards inhumanity to fellow men.
From farce as in the action of soldiers who goes with force to abduct a baby in The King... through comic elaborations in the thick of endemic tragic situations, Fred’s serio-comic stance in apprehending social problems as it affects the downtrodden in society is poignant.
Aesthetic Vision:
In The King..., Woe... and The Last Omen, the battle for succession to the throne is signified. A grand canvas of power wrestling become the aesthetic concern of these plays. This battle is often pronged in the insistence of strictures created by traditional observances and sustained by the horde of traditional opinion moulders and kings and priest who deny meaningful change in society. They deny revolutionary change which in all three plays are needed for meaningful social development, equity, justice and equalitarian realities.
In all these plays, the playwright throws his weight behind the seeds of change in characters who despite all odds fight the pollution endemic in the aristocratic cartels of kings who entrench their rights of continuity in the age long reliance of the traditional populace on the supernatural and the a-priori laws that must govern human existence.
The characters of Mejebi in The King..., Demeyin in The Last ..., Egwuaruna in Woe... and to a large extent Eyinsan in My Grandfathers Ghost: these are carriers of the writer’s vision of continuing attempt at wrestling power out of the strangle hold of perverted traditional oligarchies. The actions of these characters are pointers to the restoration of peace, progress and purity to traditional and neo-traditional existences.
The summation of these characters’ intervention are pointers to the most dominant aesthetic ideology of the writer.
It is towards this liberation of the individual essence within reasonable respect or disrespect for restrictionist forces that theatrical forms like music, scene within scenes, metaphorical symbolisms, distended satires, epic jump in time, are deployed to make statements on stage. For this reason, you find the canvas of Woe.. shifting from the domain of mankind to the numinous milky-ways of the supernatural’s, where age long ideas and phenomena become personified for debate to be possible. The debate in this play is between man (Egwaruna) and the couriers of man’s existential anguish in Death Old Age and Common Cold Personified.
In the presentation and resolution of the conflict of traditional oligarchies versus post modern ways of change, Agbeyegbe comes clean to us as a writer who respects tradition but abhors those nuances of tradition that merely keep the cycles of oppression rolling while the psyche and progress of the people is threatened and jittered.
Conclusion
While the skeletal plot of most of Agbeyegbe’s plays start with social realism, the flip from the realistic to the fabular (mythologems) through to the supernatural makes his creative ambience very wide. Alongside with the phantasma of myth and supernatural suppositions is the dogged approach through psychology of post modern realities towards the contemporary man’s need for updating his concept of good life and progress. His concern with destiny as an impenetrable reality is suspect as many of his heroes dare destiny.
His literary influence exists in a wide ambience of western and traditional African dramatic conventions. The traditional African story telling theatrical spectacle is metamorphosed into post modern form of performance with strains of epic tradition of telling in The King.... This dual heritage of western and African origins in Agbeyegbe’s works may deceive any literary wayfarer into believing that the Agbeyegbe’s vision does not exist in unique isolation. It does: In the signification and individuation of characters’ internal conflict with themselves e.g. Omajuwa in The King... on the one hand and characters conflict with a-priori or culturally given but often unrealistic laws of traditional extrapolations.
This concern often leads to tragic conclusions as in The King... of farcical elaborations as in “The last Omen”.
Suffice it is to say that Agbeyegbe’s aesthetic ideology reveal the mind of an incurable iconoclast, a fence sitting neo-nihilist who does not proclaim atheism but wonders what man make of their pantheon of gods and destiny. Fred, after all is a stickler for tradition and continuity of respect for the virtues in African culture.
Fred Agbeyegbe is a writer whose artistic ideology revolves around signifying suffering humanity through unusual debates in his theatre of ideas.
---EniOlorutidak'oseFarawek'oseF'enutembelek'oseBinuk'oseNa'kaiwosisiWiwol'aawo
