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A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
Death and the King's Horseman: A Play by Wole Soyinka
bookshelves: nobel-laureate, play-dramatisation, radio-3, published-1975, afr-nigeria, lifestyles-deathstyles, lit-richer, summer-2014, tragedy, colonial-overlords
Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Laura
Recommended for: BBC Radio Listeners
Read from July 12 to 14, 2014
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0495nrm Description: In celebration of Wole Soyinka's 80th birthday, a drama based on a real event in 1940s Nigeria. A colonial district officer intervenes to prevent a local man committing ritual suicide
Death And The King's Horseman is considered to be Professor Soyinka's greatest play. In awarding Soyinka the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the Swedish Academy drew special attention to Death and the King's Horseman as evidence of his talent for combining Yoruban and European culture into a unique kind of poetic drama.
Composer and Musical director, Juwon Ogungbe.
Fab production this, what with all the choruses, poetic prose, and the mention of buttocks cannot help but endear. Yet take away all the flippery and one is left with a very sad sacrificial tale that is not on its own is it! Sati in India is a parallel - then the Viking warriors were oft joined by their very much alive wives, not to mention Chinese and Egyptians. From wiki: In the play, the result for the community is catastrophic, as the breaking of the ritual means the disruption of the cosmic order of the universe and thus the well-being and future of the collectivity is in doubt. The community blames Elesin as much as Pilkings, accusing him of being too attached to the earth to fulfill his spiritual obligations. Events lead to tragedy when Elesin's son, Olunde, who has returned to Nigeria from studying medicine in Europe, takes on the responsibility of his father and commits ritual suicide in his place so as to restore the honour of his family and the order of the universe. Consequently, Elesin kills himself, condemning his soul to a degraded existence in the next world. In addition, the dialogue of the native suggests that this may have been insufficient and that the world is now "adrift in the void".
Another Nigerian playwright, Duro Ladipo, had already written a play in the Yoruba language based on this incident, called Oba waja (The King is Dead)
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