Madmen and Specialists

Madmen and Specialists
Written by	Wole Soyinka
Characters	Dr. Bero Old Man Mendicants Si Bero Iya Agba Iya Mate
Date premiered	August 1, 1970
Place premiered	Eugene O'Neill Theater Center
Original language	English
Subject	Nigerian Civil War
Setting	Dr. Bero's surgery and the space before it, Nigeria, 1969

Madmen and Specialists is a play by Wole Soyinka, conceived in 1970 during his imprisonment in the Nigerian Civil War. The play, Soyinka's eighth, has close links to the Theatre of the Absurd.^[1] Abiola Irele (in the Lagos Sunday Times) called it "a nightmarish image of our collective life as it appears to a detached and reflective consciousness". It was published in London 1971 by Methuen and in New York in 1972 by Hill & Wang.

Madmen and Specialists is considered Soyinka's most pessimistic play, dealing with "man's inhumanity and pervasive corruption in structures of power".^[2] The plot concerns Dr. Bero, a corrupt specialist, who imprisons and torments his physician father.

References

1. Hans M. Zell, Carol Bundy, Virginia Coulon, A New Reader's Guide to African Literature, Heinemann Educational Books, 1983, p. 171.
2. Liukkonen, Petri. "Wole Soyinka". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 10 February 2015.