THOUGH it was meant to put the lid on the week-long celebration, Crown Troupe of Africa’s production of Death and the King’s Horseman was sadly underwhelming. But that does not put the troupe’s credibility as a top-performing theatre troupe in doubt; it simply highlights how a well-meant theatrical technique can hang, draw, and quarter a performance.
While the performance was aesthetically fluorescent, it was technically flawed, giving room for mixed reviews. Written by Nigeria’s Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman depicts the story of Elesin, a Yoruba monarch’s horseman, who, by tradition, must commit ritual suicide after the king has died, and just before his burial.
The Elesin of Soyinka’s play is a hedonist – a potently virile one – and decides to go to the market square to cavort among the women there on the evening he is to commit suicide. He is very popular among them, and Olohun Iyo, the village praise singer eulogises him accordingly in a dialogue-laden first act.
Further in the poesy that constitutes the play, Elesin is destined by Prof Soyinka to set his roving eyes on a wench and immediately desire her for a bride. He blackmails Iyaloja to this end, and although the damsel in question is betrothed to her (Iyaloja‘s) son, his importunacy prevails on her.
Meanwhile, Simon Pilkings, a white colonial officer, who has been charged with the security of the town, is having the time of his life cavorting with his wife, Jane Pilkings in masquerade habiliment. They are getting set for a ball, which a Prince of England is expected to attend.
Simon gets wind that Elesin is soon to conduct himself as a felo-de-se, and that he is actively supported in this morbid cause by both the tradition and the people of the land. He interprets it as trouble and arrests the hedonistic Elesin who is found dallying prior to the suicide.
Olunde, Elesin’s son, has arrived from England to bury his father, but sensing that his father has hidden under the white man’s umbrella to show the white feather, he goes ahead to kill himself and save the family name.
Elesin, undone, and detained with his tail between his legs in the Pilkings’ residence, is expressly receiving mockery from Iyaloja. When he is made to know that his son has performed a sort of harikari to salvage the family name, he kills himself and brings the play to a close.
The play, one of Prof Soyinka’s very best, is a tricky one to produce. In fact, it is renowned for faring better in print than on stage. As such, it provided a fitting challenge for Crown Troupe of Africa (henceforth referred to as CTA) to perform in commemoration of their 20th anniversary.
Director Segun Adefila must be commended for his work. In fact, for a performance that was technically flawed, the production was a relative success. The audience seemed impressed by it, and that is the goal of theatre – to deliver a performance that will satisfy the audience.
The use of dance to create emphasis on dialogues in the performance was a deft move. Where props could have been used, Adefila made do with players who would dance into position and conduct themselves as props. Suave is the word for such artistry.
However, there was more to be desired from Adefila’s directorial approach. He used a scare-deployed technique, conscience alley, to incarnate a number of characters. Elesin, Olohun Iyo, and Iyalode all went under Adefila’s knife, and the result was a classic case of ‘one Hamlet and two princes’. Usually, a director uses this when the character is a major one, and such a character is saddled with an overwhelming quantity of dramatic monologues. The splitting of such a character would convert his monologues to dialogues.
Elesin had quite a few of those, but there was really not any need for the character to be split. Adefila split the dialogues and actions of three main characters in the play to produce an aesthetic but visually confusing play on stage. CTA’s insignia choreography in the play was evident, but it became counter-productive in the long run, serving to extend the length of an already-long play. It was glute-numbing.
In addition to the forgettable character-splitting technique, there was considerable oversight from whoever casted the performance. When splitting characters, the players to act the same character must bear striking semblance, but CTA’s character splitting was ill-executed.
Forget that one of the Elesin performers would occasionally choke on his lines. Both players (Michael Okorie and Tobi Odunsi) looked unalike. One was conspicuously taller than the other. One had his hair braided, the other did not. One choked on his line, where the other was fluent, the other reciprocated. It was confusing. Ab initio, the audience was not even savvy to the character splitting that the director had implemented. They thought there were two characters, instead on the one character played by people. Many of the Elesin dialogues were conversational and should certainly not have been split.
To give the players their dues, they tried to put on a worthy performance spirit. However, some of their constant forgetfulness to turn off their stage microphones rendered the audience privy to backstage conversation.
While both Olohun Iyo(s) – Sunmisola Taiwo and Olajumoke Lawal – did a worthwhile job of singing placebo to Elesin’s person, both Iyaloja(s) – Gloria Oghenejakpo and Abiodun Adefila – could have been more full of regalness. They had overall good acting, but it was not rounded enough to satisfy one that they properly internalised their characters.
The costumier deserves some stick for allowing anomalous hairstyles slip into the performance. The play was set in a time when weave-on was not in use. Yet, the audience found one weave-on adorned head conspicuously attacking vicissitude in the performance. Again, the costumier allowed Iyaloja to appear on stage in a less-than-befitting attire for someone of such an eminent station in the traditional Yoruba society.
If the play had a dramaturge, then some explanation is demanded from said dramaturge for allowing the accents of they who played white folk sound as they did. The audience was confronted with an assortment of accents which tried to sound British, but was dogged turbulently by its domicile Nigerian idiolect.
Adefila managed the crowd scenes as well as a true director would. Not once was there chaotic acting on stage. Aesthetics was achieved, but some niggling attention to detail was wanting.
While the audience enjoyed the performance, the aforementioned observations and a few not worth mentioning should serve to review CTA’s production of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. It cannot be taken from the troupe that they worked hard on this production; but sometimes, hard work alone does not do the trick. A little bit of technical magic is needed to make the performance resonate.