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New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self
We are living, all of us, in an exhausting world, and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You don't become as profoundly invested in art and politics as he has been over his long life unless you care to your core about the path that we as a species are charting. 'I'm a fundamentalist of human freedom,' he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. 'It's as elementary as that.' In the late 1960s, during Nigeria's civil war, he was held for two years as a political prisoner, having agitated against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, bringing the possibility of a death sentence, but he remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was succeeded by a leader who promised reform. In between, cementing Soyinka's status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Academy lauding his 'vivid, often harrowing' works and their 'evocative, poetically intensified diction.' As his 90th birthday approached last summer, though, he decided to give himself an unusual gift — in reaction to what he called 'the double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza,' which made him so pessimistic that his impulse was to withdraw completely. 'I remember going months saying to myself, I don't want to read any newspapers, I don't want to watch television news, I just want to get out, stay out and enjoy what it feels like,' he said, sitting in a greenroom at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theater for a New Audience is giving his 1958 play 'The Swamp Dwellers' its Off Broadway premiere. In a deep, strong, mellifluous voice, its lilt sounding of both Nigeria and Britain, Soyinka immediately quibbled with his own choice of language: 'Enjoy is the wrong word, of course, because you never enjoy it. You know you're missing something, and sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. But I pursued that experiment anyway, where for six months I just did not read any newspapers. Occasionally somebody would send me a link, you know, 'You must read this,' and I would, yes.' But otherwise, 'I just put my eyes away, even to avoid headlines.' It was difficult to sustain, and he said he was dogged by the feeling that 'I'm going to wake up and find that the world is gone and I'm the only one left. And what am I going to do with myself?' Yet his attempt at disengagement ended for another reason altogether, which Soyinka — a raconteur par excellence, crowned with a dashing billow of white hair — mentioned almost as a punchline when I asked. His present to himself, it turns out, had come with conditions. 'Well, my gift was up at the end of six months. So I had no choice,' he said, and laughed. Adrienne Kennedy, whose play 'He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box' had its world premiere in 2018 at Theater for a New Audience, introduced the company's artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz, to 'The Swamp Dwellers.' Now 93, Kennedy has taught Soyinka's play repeatedly, and when Horowitz asked her for a statement about it, she responded in emphatic verse, extolling Soyinka's fight for human rights for people of color and calling him the 'greatest living playwright.' She added: There. Is no one. Else who. Sees into. The thousands Of. Elements. Man. Faces. And he is willing. To. Be imprisoned For. His. Beliefs He. Is. A. Giant. . Soyinka was about 24 — out of his country for the first time, living in England — when he wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers.' Even though he was a British colonial, and would be until Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, he felt as if he was in 'alien territory' in England. 'Let's just say that my mind was very much on home,' he said. 'The politics, the realities, the climate, the food and so on. It was sort of the cusp of independence.' A 70-minute one-act, the play is set in the home of Alu and Makuri, perched on stilts above a swamp in the Niger Delta. Their grown son Igwezu has just returned from the city where he lives, only to find that the crops he planted near the village have been lost to floods. Awoye Timpo, the production's director, sees even in this early work a hallmark of Soyinka's writing: his ability 'to capture a sense of the epic inside the very, very personal.' 'Some of his other plays — 'Death and the King's Horseman,' 'The Road' — they have lots of scenes, they move in lots of different ways, but this play is compact,' she said. Soyinka said he had forgotten the existence of 'The Swamp Dwellers,' which is seldom produced these days, until he got the inquiry about this production. 'It's been done on television in a few countries, but it's been sort of overtaken by more contemporary plays and concerns,' he said. Re-encountering the work, he is painfully struck by his young self's optimistic depiction of 'a kind of hybrid community made up from different parts of the country.' 'That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,' he said. In conversation, Soyinka gives the impression of thriving on batting around ideas, arguing and re-evaluating. But he is adroit at brushing aside praise, as when I suggested that his outspokenness throughout his life was brave. 'I don't consider it bravery,' he said. 'I always explain that it's a question of being able to live with oneself. You know, it's either one believes in something or one doesn't. If you don't believe in a thing and you go along with it, I find it impossible to be at peace with myself. And I always say, I love being at peace with myself. It's true! It's true. I like to feel comfortable inside, deep inside. From that point I can do anything.' Art and politics are for him intrinsically entwined, though he does not indulge the romantic notion that turmoil is beneficial to artists. Professing himself 'a glutton for tranquillity,' he said that creating is a way of 'extracting something positive' while resisting the 'limpet gene attached to human evolution, which spells destruction, cruelty, abominations of different kinds.' He is distressed by recent events in the United States, where he once lived in self-imposed exile. He was here, too, during what he calls 'the Black struggle,' and it angers him to see the erasure of gains that his peers fought for in the civil rights movement: 'all this fervor just being rubbished.' He remembers recognizing the reversal of that progress — 'both subtly and overtly, openly as is happening right now,' he said — when it began in reaction to Barack Obama's presidency. 'Maybe as an outsider and involved very deeply with my own circumstances on the African continent — the fight against dictators, greed, the lust for power — maybe because I could stand sort of outside it, I could look inside,' he said. 'Because most of my [American] colleagues said, 'No, it couldn't happen.' I said, 'OK.'' After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, Soyinka took a pair of shears to his green card, determined to no longer 'be even a partial member of this society.' Now, he says, he looks at the United States and sees 'MAGA land.' 'It's one of the saddest developing phenomena that I know of,' Soyinka said. 'I just feel very, very sad that what's happening in the States should be happening in such a potentially progressive country.' Given the current political atmosphere in which foreign governments — including Britain, Germany and Canada — have warned their citizens about traveling to the United States, I asked if he felt safe visiting. 'Oh, I've lived in a constant state of nonsafety,' he said, with a small laugh. 'So I'm used to that. If I'm walking through the street and they pick me up, I have no problem whatsoever. You know, my laptop is where it is. It's up in the clouds.' Time and experience have shaped the hopeful young man who wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers' into a worldly old man with a dented sense of possibility. But if he regards humans as being entrenched in perpetual conflict, with 'power on the one side, freedom on the other,' he has not abandoned the battlefield. 'I've lost that sense of achievable idealism,' he said. 'But it's always there. One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That's what hurts.'
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Henry IV' Review: Two Plays Become One
A young prince and an old knight walk into a tavern … So much of Shakespeare's 'Henry IV' plays like a setup, either to a joke or to a significant turning point in English history. It's perhaps the most defining, and trickiest, element of the Henry plays, which often combine the interpersonal high jinks of a comedy with the politics and knavery of a war drama, sans the typical dramatic structure. In a new production from the Theater for a New Audience, the two 'Henry IV' plays are combined into a single adaptation that clocks in at nearly four hours. The script, by Dakin Matthews, condenses and restructures the material, while the direction by Eric Tucker opts for a more classic, toned-down staging. For all the successful work this 'Henry IV' does to combat the unwieldy bloat of the two history plays together, it does not probe the central characters enough to uphold the stakes and maintain the tension throughout the lengthy running time. The result is a serviceable production that lacks fresh revelations. The 'Henry IV' plays are part of the Henriad, the series of history plays that begin with 'Richard II' and end with 'Henry V.' Often considered the less glamorous section of Shakespeare's oeuvre, the plays are about the making and unmaking of kings, the burdens of the crown, revolts, betrayals and the disastrous clashing of many male egos. At the start of 'Henry IV,' Henry Bolingbroke (played by Matthews) has usurped the crown with the help of the Percys, a family of English lords who now lead a rebellion against Bolingbroke for that same crown they helped him procure. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke's son, Prince Hal (Elijah Jones), fetters away his time drinking and palling around with the crooked old knight John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders) and his reprehensible cohort. Hal and Falstaff's trivial pursuits are interrupted, however, when they're called to the battlefield, and by the end of 'Henry IV,' Hal has renounced his old habits, brutally rebuffed Falstaff and taken his place on the throne as King Henry V. The relationship between Hal and Falstaff, a favorite of lit majors and Shakespeare scholars, is the true heart of the material. The young prince and the old knight are like father and son, mentor and mentee, but also serve as each other's foils. They represent opposite sides of age and privilege, and their gradual dynamic shift reveals the nuances of their characters. For all his comedic purpose in the story, Falstaff emerges as a tragic figure — the niggling sideshow act in a grander story about nobility and a nation's evolution. He's the sacrificial lamb to Prince Hal's ascension. Each of the three acts ends with a major scene between Hal and Falstaff, marking another dramatic crux in their story. One of the production's strengths is how Matthews cleverly structures the script to steadily follow the arc of these two characters. However, the same nuance and decisiveness is less present in the direction and some of the performances. Jones, who played an older version of Hal in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater's recent 2024 production of 'Henry V,' offers a performance that feels unintentionally laced with ambivalence. How much is Hal inclined toward the frivolity of Falstaff and his buddies from the London underground and how much toward the throne? At what lines, in what moments does he decide to step into the role of Henry V not just in title but in attitude? These subtleties aren't always signaled by the performance. Similar is true for stage stalwart Sanders, whose wincing, slovenly Falstaff unsteadily teeter-totters across and around the stage, the butt of a colorful array of Shakespearean fat jokes. This Falstaff is a vain, boisterous clown, but not much else; Sanders's performance doesn't touch on Falstaff's underlying somberness until the end. The version of Falstaff as the sad philosophizing old man is almost completely subsumed by Falstaff the degenerate clown. Tucker, who is also the co-founder and artistic director of the innovative Off Broadway theater company Bedlam, has staged this production in the round, on a small platform stage, in a surprisingly minimalist style. There's a dry matter-of-factness to this aesthetic choice: the actors enter and exit among the audience, sometimes taking seats next to audience members along the aisles, and the music and wardrobe changes are all set up within view, along the perimeters of the Scripps Mainstage at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. This 'Henry IV' also sticks roughly to the style and fashion of the time in which it was written. The costume design, by AC Gottlieb and Catherine Zuber, is full of layered cloaks and robes, with subtle variations of textures and patterns so even the mute black and browns — occasionally interrupted by a splash of carmine for the royals — are treated with some dimension. The lighting design, by Nicole E. Lang, often draws too much attention to itself; the harsh overhead fluorescents in the early scenes give the production a distant, clinical feel. That isn't the only place where the production feels distant. Overall, it's worth applauding the cast, most of whom, with the exception of Sanders and Jones, play between two and six separate roles. And yet some of the monologuing, as with Matthews's Bolingbroke and Jones's Hal, comes across as more showy and performative than intimate and naturalistic, despite the production's attempt to draw the audience in closer through its cozier staging. There are, however, some cast members who connect more effortlessly with the audience and the text. Jordan Bellow makes a meal of his role as Hal's friend Poins, imbuing the lines with playful character and Poins's postures and movements with a comedic waywardness. James Udom handily switches between the proud, hot-tempered Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, with his puffed out chest and long, confident stride, and Pistol, a slouching soldier from Falstaff's cohort. Steven Epp is likewise charming in all respects, whether as the wry-tongued and dry-humored Worcester or the bumbling tavern waiter Francis. Over the long run time (which includes two intermissions), we see a young prince and an old knight walk into a tavern together, march on a battlefield together, trade jabs and muse on their futures. But when the prince transitions into a king and that old knight becomes irrelevant — what then? The punchlines in 'Henry IV' are as much about laughs as they are about losses. The ending must find its players, and hopefully the audience, irrevocably changed.
