On the morning of May 12, 2022, in Sokoto, Nigeria, Deborah Samuel Yakubu was murdered by fellow students. Accused of blasphemy against Islam, she was surrounded by a mob, stoned to death, and then her body set on fire. Wole Soyinka’s first new play in decades boldly brings the audience inside these events and their context. The play is brave, dynamic and relevant. 

NYU Abu Dhabi Theater Program brings our community the first staging of CANTICLES FOR A PYRE FORETOLD, a new play by Nobel laureate and NYUAD Professor Wole Soyinka, directed by Joanna Settle. 

From the playwright

“Would my hand emerge at times, knife-like, to bless? Or cut, mow down?”

(Jean Genet: The Balcony)

Several years after the Rwandan genocide, a survivor, then re-settled in the United States – stumbled on yet another refugee, this time a member of the very killer squads whose rampages she had narrowly escaped. She accosted him, set up a squawk that resulted in that fugitive’s arrest, trial and conviction. Other perpetrators elsewhere underwent like retribution, some of the most notorious being priests who had herded entire families into churches, then summoned the interahamwe to commence their gory task, now amply made easy. Their priesthood calling provided no immunity from justice, nor warded off universal repugnance. If anything, that very calling intensified their moral isolation.

The crux therefore is not located in Religion itself, but its abuses, most notably in its reduction to a mere facilitator for the consolidation of privilege and self-interest, gratification of private perversities, human separatism, the  enpowerment of predator classes against the weak and vulnerable, including their casual disposal.  CANTICLES is a narrative of the logical end of such toleration, where it becomes unremarkable to kill, instigate killing, bless the act and beatify the killers, then jet off to Paris, Dubai or Singapore with your family for a vacation, confident in the workings of this superstitious claim on solidarity.

However, CANTICLES is not an indictment of just one national instance of a serial, moral dereliction. It is a question thrown at the human claim to rational existence, and a “fundamentalist” pact of solidarity with the sanctity of every human life.

– Wole Soyinka

From the director

This play demands a critical journey beyond our biases or habits of protection. Collectively, we enter a field of willing risk, where the edges of our individual perspectives meet history, the churning present, and all possible outcomes. As a company, we practiced expansion in sight and understanding, cultivating discovery. This team of artists and intellectuals has collectively undertaken these tasks with moral courage and a commitment to the deep work of education: a willing embrace of discomfort as we dare to see more clearly those patterns of power which

shape our times. We do this alongside our capacity to deepen our humanist commitment across our differences and distinctions of sight. 

– Joanna Settle