Exploring the nexus of duty, responsibility as Soyinka’s ‘Death and The King’s Horseman’ opens at Sheffield Theatres

By Lekan Balogun
BORN in 1934, Wole Soyinka attended Government College, Ibadan, and studied at the University of Leeds, UK where he obtained a degree in Literature in 1957. Subsequently, Soyinka had a short stint as a Reader at the then newly opened Royal Court Theatre in London until 1959, before returning to Nigeria in 1960 after being awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to study African theatre traditions. He taught theatre at the University of Ibadan, where he founded ‘The 1960 Masks’, and later the ‘Orisun Theatre Company’, where he produced his plays such as The Swamp Dwellers, The Trials of Bro Jero, The Strong Breed, The Road and Death and The King’s Horseman which integrates the music, dance, and explores the mythology of his own Yorùbá people. Soyinka’s body of works are central to the emergence and subsequent development of literary drama and theatre in Nigeria, which thrived largely on oral traditions of storytelling, folklores, riddles, rituals and ceremonies.
Soyinka wrote Death and the King’s Horseman while he held a fellowship at the Churchill College in Cambridge in 1973. According to Soyinka, the “triggering mechanism” was a bust of Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister, which was erected near the stairs of his campus hostel as it represented for him the colonial apparatus in colonial Nigeria of the time the play was set. The plot of Death and the King’s Horseman revolves around Elesin Oba (the King’s Horseman) who is required to commit ‘ritual death’ following the demise of the king but is stopped by his own weakness and the intervention of the British colonial officer, Simon Pilkings who prevents Elesin from performing this important task on behalf of his people. Olunde, Elesin Oba’s son, who returns home from England where he had gone to study with the intention to bury his father and appropriately sustain the sacred duty, is surprised to see Elesin in chains as Pilkings’ prisoner. Wanting to defend the honour of their household, Olunde seizes the gauntlet, taking it upon himself to die in place of his father.
Although based on real life events in Òyó, Yorùbáland in Nigeria, in 1946, Soyinka made slight changes to the historical details in the play, setting the actions back a few years to when the second world war raged, to show that history is itself a performance, and that the playwright’s world commands us to surrender our disbelief to give public memory a touch that is either therapeutic or traumatic. Setting the actions back a few years also allowed Soyinka to show how the unfolding drama in Òyó was impacted by global political situation especially the world war in which Britain was also a key player. Colonial rule had already played a significant role in (re)shaping the landscape and destiny of people, yoking together many disparate, independent nation-states, including the Yorùbá empire, one of the most important traditional societies of the time. Although Soyinka played down on the colonial factor in the tragedy which he dramatizes, insisting that Pilkings’ intervention is merely an unfortunate incident and that the tragedy is the doom that Elesin’s failure to venerate tradition spells for the Yorùbá universe in the play, the colonial factor provides a broader, global perspective to the botched ritual traditions. Moreover, it is important to mention the ways that the colonial presence also contributed to the change in the local, cultural traditions, political orientation, and the geographical landscape in their totality.
Soyinka’s exploration of the themes of duty and responsibility also underscores the colonial factor, as emphasized by both Elesin Oba and Pilkings’ different perspectives about what the two concepts mean under different circumstances and cultural realities. We see this in how Soyinka draws a parallel between the cataclysmic consequences of the second world war on humanity at a global scale, especially by moving the actions of the play backwards a few years to when the war raged. Staging the play currently also recall events in our own time, such as the Russian-Ukraine war, conflict in the Middle East [Israel-Palestine] etc. Soyinka himself has argued of theatre as “one of the earliest arenas in which [humanity] has attempted to come to terms with the spatial phenomenon of [their] being” (See: Myth, Literature and the African World).

Wale Ojo (left) and Kehinde Bankole (3rd from left) and other cast members at the rehearsal
In Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka celebrates the Yorùbá people’s belief about human existence, the continuity of life after death, and the dynamics of creation. Yorùbá art, religion and philosophical tradition have offered cultural inspiration since its ancient roots dating back to 1500 BCE and continues to intrigue scholars and artists worldwide. The Yorùbá world is an integrated whole containing the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the world of the unborn all of which are linked together by the fourth realm, which Soyinka describes as the numinous passage or abyss of transition. Birth and death are two important ontological journeys that represent the metaphysical process by which relationship of the living and the dead are sustained. Music, chant, dance and other related aesthetic resources used in the play are also some of the ways in which the rites are observed.
Storytelling among the Yorùbá people is a revered art, a major activity for fostering social bonds, unity, and cooperation, thereby contributing to society’s cohesion. Drums and music also add to the aesthetics of telling stories, contributing to the comprehending of the Yorùbá worldview in time and space. Soyinka delves into the hallowed tradition of his people, demonstrating how dialogue, rhythm, and action in the theatre are presented with meaning, coming out not only from the songs and dances, but also from proverbs, wise sayings, and praise poems.
Since its publication in 1975, the play has had a truly remarkable staging history that is quite difficult to fully capture here – three by Soyinka himself: the premiere at the Oduduwa Hall, University of Ife (later Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1976), the Goodman Theater, Chicago (transferred to the J.F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC,1979), and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre (London Centre, New York, 1987). Stagings in Nigeria include: the University of Ibadan Arts Theatre (directed by Segun Ojewuyi, 1984), the National Arts Theatre Lagos (directed by Bode Osanyin, 1988), the Lagos Diamond Production/Nigerian International Bank (directed by Bayo Oduneye, 1990), and the MUSON Centre, Lagos celebrating Soyinka’s 70th birthday (directed by Ahmed Yerima) among others. While its international productions included the XII Festival Internazionale del Teatro Universitario, L’Aquil (directed by Giancarlo Gentilucci, 1986), Manchester Royal Exchange theatre Company (directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 1990), Taylor Theatre, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (directed by Alan Cook, 2006), the Fehinty African Theatre Ensemble (FATE) at the Bailiwick Arts Center, Chicago (directed by Adekunle Akingboju, 2007), the St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre and the SIUC Theater Department (directed by Segun Ojewuyi, 2008), the Royal National Theatre, London (directed by Rufus Norris), and many other high-profile productions in universities and major art centres across the globe.

Director Mojisola Kareem
Staging of the play in Sheffield Theatre in 2025, the 50th year of its publication and a few months after Soyinka clocked 90 years, may well be a worthy birthday present to the playwright and the first writer of African descent to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Reviews have emphasized how Soyinka depicts a world rich in ritual, where modern technology fits uneasily among ancient spirits, and forges a unique dramatic language in which the natural and supernatural combine in traditional ritual performance. While the play brings together myriads of narratives, fables, songs, chants and dances celebrating and elegizing the terror of death, and showing that death is a universal concept, Soyinka insisted that what he dramatizes is “largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which Elesin and the universe of the Yorùbá mind.” Directed by Mojisola Kareem, founder and artistic director of Utopia, a National Portfolio organization established in 2012, this production is indeed historical and significant, highlighting the company’s aim of creating exceptional world-class African theatre with imaginative flair for the British and international stage.
Dr. Balogun, consultant on culture at Utopia Theatre and dramaturg of the play,age.a lecturer in New Writing and Intercultural Performance at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK. This piece is a text of the dramaturge’s notes to the presentation of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which runs February 3-8 at Sheffield Theatres, UK. Directed by Mojisola Kareem, the performance, which features Lagos-based renowned actors, Wale Ojo and Kehinde Bankole in the lead, is courtesy Utopia Theatre. The author, Wole Soyinka, poet, essayist and rights activist, is expected to attend the presentation before t ends on February 8th)