Treading the Boards

Wole Soyinka

As I mentioned, this weekend Our Boy "treaded the boards" in the play Travel Club and Boy Soldier by Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize Laureate 1986). The play is about a group of teenage school students on holiday somewhere among the South Sea Islands. It is a playground for some people but can be life and death for the people who live there.

The play shows the young people trapped in the airport after an insurrection has taken place. During their discussions we learn that one boy's father was killed by terrorists in Northern Ireland, another has an account of how a bus in India was ambushed and the Hindus savagely murdered and another tells of the massacre of the Igbo people in the Biafra war.

It is clear that extremism is not confined to any one place.

As they wait in the airport the young people are asked to make a moral choice, either to hand over their passports and be relatively safe or to refuse because handing them over is probably the start of segregation which could have fatal consequences. At this point one of them states, 'You don't argue with a man with a gun,' and three of the young people leave. The others are confronted by the commandante and an armed guard.

The commandante of the airport is a young person no older than the school students. In what might seem a despairing speech he describes the violence he has witnessed and claims that he has now replaced questions with orders.

But he finishes by hoping that perhaps the future may return to something like that of the school students.

A play with real food for thought
- and very well acted by all
(and that is NOT maternal pride speaking!)

:-)