Sheffield is in luck. The Crucible theatre next month offers 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 Theatre in 2009 and included the work in my book on The 101 Greatest Plays, yet even now I am still wrestling 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 of Soyinka’s life apart from the obvious facts that he is a 90-year-old Nobel laureate and Nigeria’s most famous writer. From the start, his life represents a fusion of opposites. He was steeped in Yoruba tradition with its multiple gods yet his parents were passionate Christian converts. Soyinka’s studies took him from Ibadan to Leeds, where he came under the tutelage of the scholar G Wilson Knight who focused on the mythical and miraculous elements in Shakespeare.
After two years working at London’s Royal Court, Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1960 and formed a theatre company that specialised in satirical revues. He became a public figure preaching a belief in what he called his “one abiding religion – human liberty”. All this led eventually to his imprisonment in 1967 for allegedly conspiring with Biafran rebels during the Nigerian civil war.
I give this thumbnail sketch because it seems relevant to Death and the King’s Horseman, with its potent blend of the mythic, the satiric and the tragic. Written in 1975 and based on events which took place in the ancient Yoruba city of Oyo in 1946 – though Soyinka shifts the action back to the time of the second world war – the play has a clear enough starting point: Elesin, the hero of the title, is obliged by Yoruba custom to commit ritual suicide 30 days after his master’s death, to accompany him into the next world. What complicates matters is that Elesin’s transition is delayed initially by his encounter with a beautiful young woman in the marketplace. His death is also forestalled by the determination of the British district officer, Pilkings, to stamp out what he sees as a barbaric custom and to avoid civic unrest during a royal visit. When Elesin’s westernised eldest son, studying medicine in London, unexpectedly returns you have all the ingredients for a tragic denouement.
But just what sort of play is this? Clearly one that is open to multiple misinterpretations. Nigerian radicals attacked Soyinka for his supposed celebration of a retrograde custom. Seizing 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 readiness for a fancy dress ball – many western critics described the play as being about “a clash of cultures”. Soyinka himself, however, has summarily dismissed both ideas. In an essay, Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?, he countered Marxist critics 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 “clash of cultures” idea on the grounds that “it presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter”.
So where does that leave us? I see the play principally as a contest between the forces of life and creativity on the one hand and death and destructiveness on the other. I’ve just been watching Visconti’s film of The Leopard and there is a moment when Burt Lancaster’s Prince, embodying a dying class, dances a waltz with his nephew’s dazzling fiancee: that, for me, seems oddly similar to Elesin’s act of sensual defiance with his young bride when he is on the threshold of death.
But my eyes have been opened by reading a book by Ketu H Katrak called Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy. Katrak acutely analyses three Soyinka plays – The Road (1965), The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) – and conclusively argues that the dramatist creates a distinctive form of tragedy in which the death of an individual energises the community at large. You could argue that this is a very Brechtian idea. But it strikes me that Soyinka’s true greatness lies in his blend of Yoruba and European tradition and in the fusion, rather than the collision, of two cultures.
Death and the King’s Horseman is at the Crucible, Sheffield, 3-8 February
