Death and the King’s Horseman: the return of the enduring mystery by Wole Soyinka | Theater

SHeffield is lucky. Next month, the Crucible Theater is offering a rare staging of an extraordinary play: Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka. I saw Rufus Norris’s brilliant production at the National Theater in 2009 and included the work in my book on the 101 greatest plays, but even today I still grapple with its ultimate meaning . Ambivalence, however, is for me one of the true tests of theatrical quality.

You can’t begin to understand the work without knowing a little about Soyinka’s life, apart from the obvious fact that he is a 90-year-old Nobel laureate and Nigeria’s most famous writer. From the beginning, his life represents a fusion of opposites. He was steeped in Yoruba tradition with its multiple gods, but his parents were passionate Christian converts. Soyinka’s studies took him from Ibadan to Leeds, where he was under the tutelage of the scholar G Wilson Knight who focused on the mythic and miraculous elements of Shakespeare.

After two years working at the Royal Court in London, Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1960 and established a theater company specializing in satirical revues. He has become a public figure preaching his belief in what he calls his “one religion: human freedom.” All this eventually led to his imprisonment in 1967 for allegedly conspiring with Biafra rebels during the Nigerian Civil War.

I give this thumbnail sketch because it seems relevant to Death and the King’s Horseman, with its powerful blend of the mythical, the satirical, and the tragic. Written in 1975 and based on events in the ancient Yoruba town of Oyo in 1946 – although Soyinka takes the action back to the time of World War II – the play has a fairly clear starting point: Elesin, the hero of the title, is obliged by Yoruba custom to commit ritual suicide 30 days after the death of his master, to accompany him to the other world. Complicating matters is that Elesin’s transition is initially delayed by his encounter with a beautiful young woman in the market. His death is also anticipated by the determination of the British district official, Pilkings, to eradicate what he sees as a barbaric custom and avoid civic unrest during a royal visit. When Elesin’s westernized eldest son, studying medicine in London, returns unexpectedly, you have all the ingredients for a tragic outcome.

But what kind of piece is it? Obviously, this one is open to multiple misinterpretations. Nigerian radicals attacked Soyinka for his alleged celebration of a backward custom. Drawing on the collision between Yoruba tradition and colonial stupidity – and it is worth pointing out that Pilkings and his wife are first seen wearing death masks in anticipation of a costume ball – many Western critics have described the piece as being “a clash of cultures”. “. Soyinka himself, however, summarily rejected both ideas. In an essay titled Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?, he countered Marxist criticism by arguing that, far from being an endorsement of feudal practice, his play interpreted the past through a vision of the present. In his introduction to the play, Soyinka also vigorously demolishes the idea of ​​the “clash of cultures” on the grounds that it “presupposes a potential equality in each given situation of foreign culture and indigenous culture, on the very soil of these latest”.

So where does this leave us? I see the play primarily as a struggle between the forces of life and creativity on the one hand and death and destructiveness on the other. I just watched Visconti’s film The Leopard and there is a moment where Burt Lancaster’s Prince, embodying a dying class, dances a waltz with his nephew’s dazzling fiancée: this, to me, looks suspiciously like Elesin’s act of sensual defiance with his young wife while he is on the verge of death.

But my eyes were opened by reading a book by Ketu H Katrak called Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy. Katrak carefully analyzes three of Soyinka’s plays – The Road (1965), The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) – and conclusively argues that the playwright creates a particular form of tragedy in in which the death of an individual energizes the community as a whole. You could say that this is a very Brechtian idea. But it seems to me that Soyinka’s true greatness lies in its blending of Yoruba and European traditions and in the fusion, rather than collision, of two cultures.