Madmen and Specialists

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".

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.