Wole Soyinka is adamant that his great, neglected 1975 play cannot be reduced to a study of “the clash of cultures”. I see what he means. This rich turbulent piece, which starts as folk comedy and ends as Greek tragedy, takes on board an abundance of ideas: identity, tradition, the passage from life to death. It says much for Rufus Norris’s liberating production that these themes emerge with tumultuous force.
Although set in what is now Nigeria during the second world war Soyinka’s play is based on an incident that took place in the Yoruba town of Oyo in 1946. What we see is the king’s horseman, Elesin, preparing to follow the ancient custom of committing ritual suicide after his master’s death.
But the event is the cause of celebration with the swaggering Elesin impregnating a young bride on the eve of his extinction. All this is anathema to the British district officer, Pilkings, who decides to intervene. Against the wishes of Elesin’s eldest son, returned from studying medicine in London, Pilkings places the horseman under arrest with disastrous consequences.
In one sense, the play is a timely warning against the perils of “humanitarian intervention”: in a key passage Olunde, the horseman’s son, tells Pilkings’s wife: “You have no respect for what you do not understand.”
But Soyinka’s play is as much philosophical as political. Through the character of Olunde, it raises the dilemma of being caught in the crossfire between rival traditions. Even more disturbingly, Soyinka asks us to look beyond our rational distrust of ceremonial suicide.
This is tough stuff for a materialist British audience to take on board. But, in a stroke of radical daring, Norris makes it easier by presenting the play with an all-black cast that “whites” up to play the colonialists. This is a classic piece of Brechtian alienation that forces us to examine the issues at stake. It also yields moments of startling comedy. To see Lucian Msamati and Jenny Jules as the Pilkings posing as upper class imperialists is initially as hilarious as watching a group of Yoruba women mimicking the British habit of crossing and uncrossing their legs.
Norris’s production, with the aid of Katrina Lindsay’s spectacular design, moves assuredly from the teeming world of a raffia-filled market to the play’s elemental conclusion. There are sterling performances from Nonso Anonzie as the horseman, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as his son and Claire Benedict as the market leader. One emerges dazzled but also disturbed by Soyinka’s ideas: in particular, the unfashionable notion that death can be seen as a triumphant entrance rather than a tragic exit.
