A Spotlight dramabook

Written in 1971, Madmen and Specialists is one of Soyinka's most excoriating portrayals of abusers and abused in the new Nigeria ushered in by Biafra and the civil war of 1967-70. Set in the "surgery" of a doctor, the play is populated by mendicants and the "insane," all fodder for "experimentation" by a shape-shifting doctor whose experiments may be more sinister than they at first appear.

This is a play within a play. The cook has been murdered but her employers seem to be indifferent. Her son is in a seminary and in distress. The maid is pregnant. The valet is philandering. The playwright, the central character in this play, says that he has lost his touch and is suffering writer's block. The Harvard Crimson 8/1/1967 noted: "The thick plot involves murder, rape, abortion, white slavery, and class struggle. And yet the author-actor, by continually breaking and repeating scenes and by imposing comic relief, subordinates the plot to his own creative concerns. At the end, the murderer is discovered by coincidence, and the plot is settled."