Review: Death and the King’s Horseman

Nigerian Yoruba myth has become a powerful force in British theatre. The American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney drew on it for his brilliant debut, The Brothers Size. So does this revival of Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play that leaves Judeo-Christian certainties about the sanctity of life in doubt, and might even illuminate us about the mindset of the modern suicide bomber, a point recently made by the author. Not that the suicide here is the kind of self-destruction that destroys others.

Nigeria’s Yoruba people believe in states of being that exist before and after life. The unborn are conscious before birth. Death is a portal through which the living join their ancestors. And it is this final stage of transition with which Soyinka is concerned.

His play was inspired by real events that followed the death of a Yoruba king in 1945. Tradition has it that the monarch’s horseman must follow his king into the next world. But the British colonial officer of the day ruled that such acts were an affront to the civilising influences of his regime. He prevented the suicide, so the horseman’s son saved his family’s honour by carrying out the ritual instead of his father.

Soyinka’s plot, which is set in the town of Oyo in 1943, sticks closely to this story. And Rufus Norris’s vibrant production sets out its stall in the marketplace where the traders’ banter is accompanied by the articulate rhythms of percussionists. Articulate, that is, to those who speak drum.

Central to all the hustle and bustle is Elesin the horseman, played by Nonso Anozie, a man-planet of an actor who could kill with one pectoral. It is he who must pay for a life of privilege in which he has been allowed to have as many brides as he liked by following his dead master. And it is he who Lucian Msamati’s British district officer has decided to incarcerate in the name of civilisation.

Norris’s production has caused a stir by casting the white British characters with whited-up black actors. The suggestion that this is as offensive as the reviled practice of white actors blacking up is nonsensical — like saying the French have as much right to be offended at being called “Frog” as Jews when they are called “Yid”. No, they don’t.

What is being depicted here is not so much white ethnicity, but a story being told by the people on whom a foreign culture has been imposed. Well, OK. You can get away with a fair amount of stereotyping with that argument. And the English come in for a fair amount of ribbing — no more mercilessly than when the etiquette-obsessed colonisers are impersonated by local women with hilarious posh accents. It is an entertaining moment, and I wouldn’t argue that the occupied do not have the right to take the mick out of the occupiers. But it distracts from Soyinka’s argument that he never intended to depict a clash of cultures, but rather warn of the folly of one civilisation imposing its values on another. “Your people have no respect for that which they don’t understand,” says Elesin’s son (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) to the English officer’s wife, played by a whited-up Jenny Jules.

The lesson climaxes with Elesin chained as a way of protecting him from his own traditions. It is an image that is disturbing not just because it brings to mind slavery, but because it makes you question whether, as incomprehensible as ritual suicide is to our culture, it would not have been better for the British officer to have let the man die.

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