| Madmen and Specialists | |
| Characters: | Dr. Bero Old Man Mendicants Si Bero Iya Agba Iya Mate |
| Setting: | Dr. Bero's surgery and the space before it, Nigeria, 1969 |
| Orig Lang: | English |
| Subject: | Nigerian Civil War |
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". It was published in London 1971 by Methuen and in New York in 1972 by Hill & Wang.
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.