SOURCE: Nouryeh, Andrea J. “Soyinka's Euripides: Postcolonial Resistance or Avant-Garde Adaptation?” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 4 (winter 2001): 160-71.

In the following essay, Nouryeh explores how The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, Soyinka's adaptation of the play by Euripides, significantly alters the role that gender politics played in the original text and concludes that Soyinka's version acts as “problematized example of a decolonized canonical work.”

After encountering Isidore Okpewho's essay “Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire” (in RAL 30.4: 32-55), I was challenged not only to read Euripides's The Bacchae through the lens of Soyinka's adaptation but further to read Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides as a reaction to the source text through the lens of Okpewho's critical eyes. This kind of comparative reading entails unraveling a dense web of intertextuality inherent in a dramaturgical approach to contemporary theatrical adaptations of classical plays. First, there are my own...