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 (1981; see WLT 55:4, p. 718).

The play begins with a "red sky in the morning" that turns out to have been caused by the torching of Maroko, and the refugees from the settlement subsequently invade the stage. The loosely structured "Lagosian kaleidoscope" incorporates, through a variety of conventions, verses from Soyinka's 1983 record "Unlimited Liability...