Wole Soyinka’s Theatre: the “Fourth Stage”

 


The “Fourth Stage” is uniquely Soyinka’s interpretation of Yoruba mythology in which there are four parallel worlds of the living, the dead, the unborn and the chthonic (underworld) realm, where the ambiguities of cultural identities are contested. These worlds exist in a non-hierarchical manner, and their membranous nature allows the dwellers to access these different worlds at will. This interpretation is the central thesis of Soyinka in his essays, “Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype”, “Drama and the African Worldview” and “The Fourth Stage”. The main argument is that African myth and ritual (exemplary in Yoruba mythology) are not discrete background cultural objects but form the continuing aesthetic and social foregrounding of African society.

By starting off with Nietzsche’s theory of the ritual roots of classical Greek theatre, Soyinka explains the roots of African (Yoruba) ritual tragedy in the myth of Ogun and the sacral rites depicting his prowess in battle and metallurgy. For Nietzsche, Dionysius and Apollo are actually art “states” or affects. Dionysius is the “state” of wild dreams and Apollo is the “state” of rational contemplation. Soyinka envisions Nietzsche's parallels in the mythic rituals associated with Ogun and Obatala, two central Yoruba divinities.

For Soyinka, Ogun is “coarse” and creative, but Obatala is calm and contemplative. Soyinka argues that these neat categories conceal a lot of complexities. Obatala’s contemplative essence conceals his radical force as “creator”. And Ogun can be rational and irrational, creative and destructive. In general, it is possible to read Soyinka’s plays or even stage them as illustrating this binary of Ogun/Obatala. On the other hand, Soyinka challenges mimesis, and mystifies the boundaries between art and life further by invoking a “fourth stage” which in his view is accounted for in Yoruba mythology: “It is the chthonic realm, the area of the really dark forces, the really dark spirits, and it also is the area of stress of the human will”.

Interpreting Soyinka’s “fourth stage” as a performance prototype suggests that the actor can either be the virtual mime (or imitation) of the deity, or a mouthpiece (or representation) of the deity he is playing; or, a cross between both possibilities. Although Soyinka offers the fourth stage as “the vortex of archetypes and home of the tragic spirit” (Soyinka, 1976:149), he does not stage these archetypes (for instance, Ogun, Obatala, Sango, etc.) in his plays as characters in their own right, they are mostly discernible as psychological essences or social references in the urban legends that Soyinka creates in his plays.

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