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.