Drama and Prophecy: The J. P. Clark Paradigm

Abstract

The utilitarian aesthetic of drama cannot be disputed
particularly in Africa as it has since held sway and decked
itself out from the genesis of the literary drama of the
continent. This is because most African dramatists across
the boundaries of critical currents have used drama to treat
one social issue or the other. This approach to dramatic
creativity is an appropriation of drama as a veritable weapon
of social reconstruction. No doubt it is a methodological
product of the Marxist aesthetics which is home to theatre
of Ideology, commitment and radicalism. J. P. Clark is one
dramatist of the first generation of playwrights in Africa whose
works were widely read and given scholarly attention. Critics
have branded him and his contemporaries like Wole Soyinka
as dramatists who are at home in the poetics of metaphysical
animism or animist metaphysics. Their works come under
severe attack from the critics of Marxist persuasion as lacking
ideology, commitment and interprets history as static. With
the creation of The Wives’ Revolt an opportunity has been
created to look at his new dramatic work from another critical
angle. Thus, this paper examines the appropriation of drama
for prediction and prophesies using J. P. Clark’s The wives’
revolt as a reference. The paper is divided into three sections.
The first section deals with an exploration of the subject of
prophecy. We devote the second section to examining drama
and prediction or prophesy as dramatized and portrayed in
The wives’ revolt. The third and final section is the conclusion
of the literary investigation which holds that J .P. Clark has
used the medium of drama to predict or prophesy socioeconomic
and political events in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.