SOURCE: Gibbs, James. Review of The Beatification of Area Boy, by Wole Soyinka. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 750-51.

In the following review, Gibbs commends the “musical elements” in The Beatification of Area Boy but asserts that the play's conclusion is its “weakest point.”

The Beatification of Area Boy opened in Leeds, on the day that Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were sentenced to death by a tribunal in Port Harcourt. Ten days into the run, the gruesome details of the execution of the Ogoni 9 broke on the world. While hinting at this kind of state violence in his play, Wole Soyinka has, generally, avoided the heavy-handed satire of such earlier works as A Play of Giants, creating a text that relies more heavily on music than anything he has written since Opera Wonyosi.

The play begins with a “red sky in the morning” that turns out to...