“Life is honour. It ends when honour ends.”
Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre is a curiously intimate venue; an open stage and low-slung seating guarantee that no audience member is more than 22 metres for the performers at any time. It’s the perfect place, then, to stage Wole Soyinka’s 1975 masterpiece, Death and the King’s Horseman, brought to life for 2025 by Mojisola Kareem, founder of the African drama collective Utopia Theatre. This is a play which hits its hardest when the audience has a sense of the community at its heart, and the upheaval which has been wrought upon it.
Soyinka’s life, and that of his most famous play, are stories in their own right. Imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War, exiled in its aftermath, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 (the first recipient of African descent), he penned Death and the King’s Horseman while a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. The drama is based upon a historical incident from 1946 in late colonial Nigeria. Soyinka sets it earlier, during the Second World War, allowing the human conflict of his play to sit in the shadow of a moment of great historical violence.
Tradition, colonialism and misbehaviour
The play tells the story of Elesin, sworn horseman to the Alaafin of Oyo. According to Yoruba tradition, Elesin must commit ritual suicide a month after his sovereign’s death, to ensure the safe passage of the king’s soul through the afterlife.
The carefully arranged ritual cosmology of the Yoruba is thrown off-kilter when Elesin, a “man of enormous vitality” and sexual appetites, chooses a young woman betrothed to another man as his final bride; it is shattered entirely when the colonial District Officer, Simon Pilkings, learns of the custom, and takes it upon himself to stamp it out. As Elesin is beset by haunting visitations, and the boundaries between this world and the next wear thin, his estranged son Olunde returns from his medical studies in England – with devastating consequences to follow.
Kareem’s staging of the story is physically and audibly resplendent, with a deceptively simple backdrop only highlighting the gorgeous costuming, and sound design which is by turns triumphant and spine-tinglingly eerie. The egungun – elaborate Yoruba costumes for the remembrance of dead ancestors, blasphemously repurposed by Pilkings and his wife Jane for a costume party at the European Club – are perhaps the most striking.
A multifaceted theatrical experience
Soyinka has insisted that the play not be read as a simple anti-colonial parable, or a just-so tale of ‘culture clash’. Certainly, it’s far too rich a text to be boiled down to something so simple, and yet the transformations worked upon Yoruba society by British colonisation – both deliberately and unconsciously – are an inescapable part of the play’s fabric. In some scenes, such as an animated debate between Olunde and Jane Pilkings on questions of duty, sacrifice, and civilisation, the play comes across almost as a dialogue – but always one driven by the imperatives of theme and characterisation.
An incredibly strong cast serves as the driving motor of the performance. Wale Ojo gives an electrifying, Lear-esque performance as Elesin, a larger-than-life figure brought low by his own desires, while Michael Ahomka-Lindsay is flinty, reserved, and resolute as Olunde. Kehinde Bankole is downright fantastic as Iyaloja – ‘mother’ of the Oyo market, and perhaps the one role in the play capable of matching Elesin in sheer charisma – while Bridget Nkem’s subtle, low-dialogue performance as Elesin’s young bride ties together the performance’s commentaries on gender, patriarchy, and the damaged lives which ‘great’ men so often leave in their wake.
Despite its ultimate conclusion as a tragedy, Death and the King’s Horseman is strongly comedic at times, and the audience burst into gales of laughter more than once. At one point, Olunde questions the taste of the colonial elites throwing a masquerade for a touring royal, amid mass slaughter in Europe and North Africa; Jane Pilkings defends it as “therapy – British style!”
Rather than a humorous add-on, these elements seem to me an integral part of the whole, important to understanding the play’s themes of spiritual imbalance. When the world is thrown upside down by people who do not even pretend to understand it, what else is there to do but laugh?
