Death and the Horseman
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Wole Soyinka's play Death and the Horseman is both essentially African and classically Western. The story itself is one about African characters and events that took place (and could only have taken place) within the context of colonial Africa. But the form of the play is Western in at least two different ways. It both adheres to specific Western theories about how a play should be constructed and adopts a Western genre. Traditional Africans two hundred years ago would not have sat down and written a play like this about such events because formally scripted plays designed to be performed on a proscenium stage with the same lines spoken each night to an audience awaiting a neat climax is not a traditional African way of understanding or presenting history. Soyinka has created a hybrid form for a hybrid land, arguing (implicitly, by the very act of writing this play) that neither traditional African means of expression nor fully Western ones would be adequate to tell a story in which two sets of history collided.The play recalls events that happened in Oyo, Nigeria, in 1946, when this ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria saw the death of a king. This death was to be followed by the suicide of Elesin Oba, who in life had served as the king's chief horseman and who in death must accompany him to the afterworld so that he does not lose his way. The story up to this point is sad, but not a tragedy. People die, and throughout the broad course of human history men and women have followe
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, and about what happens when people leave the place that they were born to. The tragedy would not have occurred if Pilkings had stayed at home, but it would also not have occurred if Olunde had stayed at home. The world of colonial Africa is fragmenting, and Soyinka understands the cost of this and so has crafted a classical play in which we understand in ancient terms the synergy of a moment and a place.
Soyinka has also drawn on other Western models of playmaking to craft his own work, although these provide fits that are less good. There is something in this play of Artaud's model that each play - and the theatre itself - should be "a theatre of blood, a theatre which, with each performance, will have done something bodily to the one who performs as well as the one who comes to see others perform, but actually the actors are not performing, they are doing. The theatre is in reality the genesis of creation. This will happen." Artaud made this proclamation just before his death in 1948, just after the events that this play chronicles, and we can see a congruence in his philosophy and the world's events and this play.
The world itself was a theater of blood in the 1940s and Artaud was rights in calling for a dramaturgy that cou
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1652
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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