The Road - Wole Soyinka: Critical Summary

Introduction:

The Road is a very complex play, a combination of comedy and tragedy, very much Shakespearean in its make-up. The play shows the satirical and spiritual attitude of the dramatist. The subject of death, presented in The Road is found in an early poem ‘Death in the Dawn’. Another event which makes Soyinka to write this poem is the death of his friend Segun Awolowo in an accident.

The Setting and the Characters:

The play is set along a road, the road from life to death. The cast is a superbly seeded gang, including the driver of a passenger-truck No Danger No Delay; his passenger – tout and driver’s mate, Samson, a Captain of Thugs called Say Tokyo Kid; and a splendidly pliable policeman, Particulars Joe; and brooding over all with menacing benevolence, Professor, proprietor of the driver’s haven (AKSIDENT STORE – ALL PARTS AVAILEBUL), a dismissed lay-reader, but also the oppressively strange death-in-life figure.

The Subject-Matter of the Play: Death:

Everyone in the play is the servant, or agent, or priest, or student of death. The road itself is ruled by Ogun, the god of war and death and roads. Road accidents, which Professor, the missionary of death, helps to arrange by removing road signs from dangerous points of the road, are Ogun’s High Masses. Drivers are the constant companions of death. Death is described as a harvest. “Death is the select harvest of a faithful gleaner”, says the Professor, using an agricultural metaphor.

The Theme and Action of the Play:

The play is prefaced by Alagemo, a poem, which provides clue to the play. “Alagemo is simply, a religious cult of flesh dissolution”, the dance in the play symbolizing suspension of death. The thems of the work is, life conceived of as a movement towards dissolution. The action of the play is, arrest of time at the point where man is dissolving into the underworld. The characters play their distinctive roles in the play, whose title is suggestive, of the hazardous road in a stifling and a corrupting world. This bleak and difficult subject is enriched by a mulch of religious myth, Yoruba custom and tradition.

Significance of the Characters in The Road:

All the characters in the play are associated with some religion – either Yoruban - the local one, or Christianity – the foreign one.

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