A thrilling culture shock has been arranged, immersing us in the unfamiliar philosophy and religious traditions of Nigeria’s Yoruba people.
The Olivier stage is beset by interesting strangeness. An agitation of drum-beats communicates anxiety; an anti-hero slips into a trance; women are variously caught in song and euphoric dance, carrying wicker baskets on their heads and at the climactic finale swaying side to side, intoning a funeral dirge; a fancy-dress ball parades puppets and humans in 17th-century European costumes; black actors wear white masks to impersonate the leisured, white ruling class: in this last instance the imaginative director, Rufus Norris, is reprising Jean Genet’s brilliant tactic in The Blacks, to help make a thorough mockery of Anglo-Saxon, upper-middle class voices.
The extraordinary Death and the King’s Horseman, by Nobel prize‑winning Wole Soyinka, has never been seen in London although it premiered more than 30 years ago. Imbued with the fatalistic spirit of classic Greek tragedy, and inspired by a real-life suicide in Nigeria during 1946, though the action is back-dated to 1943, Soyinka’s drama looks back in anger to a conflict that erupts in an ancient Yoruba city. A British colonial officer intervenes to stop a ritual suicide, with quite the wrong fatal results.
Soyinka is not simply intent upon showing how an authoritarian British colonial regime puts a repressing hand upon the indigenous blacks.
Something more startling is afoot. He takes as his starting point the death of the king of Oyo, an event requiring the monarch’s horseman, Nonso Anozie’s increasingly impassioned Elesin, to commit ritual suicide and escort the king’s favourite horse and dog to the world of his ancestors.
The British ruling class, ignorant of antique Yoruba tradition and its sense of the dead, living and unborn being in a state of intimate relationship, forbids the act. Terrific fun is made of the silly, bigoted British: Lucian Msamati and Jenny Jules are respectively and hilariously the district officer, Simon, and his wife Jane. And when Elesin’s English-educated eldest son appears, ruling class intransigence precipitates catrastrophe.
You may need to read the excessively long-winded, ornamental text before seeing it acted by a not always intelligible cast — Claire Benedict’s accusatory Mother of the Market, for example. And Norris sometimes puts visual excitement before verbal clarity but Soyinka creates a thrilling, fresh tragic genre.
Booking to 17 June. Information: 020 7452 3000.
Death And The King's Horseman
National Theatre: Olivier
South Bank, SE1 9PX
