Critical review of Soyinka’s The Beautification of Area Boy

By Ekanpou Enewaridideke

WOLE Soyinka is a Nigerian known across the globe as a playwright, novelist, poet, critic, actor, director and a human rights activist who relentlessly castigates his generation often with a clear-cut blueprint for its moral regeneration, mostly through satire. Soyinka, reputed for his constant healthy criticism of the nauseating structures in his society, engages this age-long task artistically from a very different plane in the play, The Beatification Of Area Boy.

The Beatification Of Area Boy first published in Great Britain (1995) and later in Nigeria (1999), is an exploration of the suffocating absurdity in the Nigerian society under military regime and by extension, any African country where these retrogressive structures exist unquestioned. This work perfectly exemplifies THEATRE OF THE ABSURD which according to A Dictionary of Literature by…