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Death and the King’s Horseman interview

Written by Jo Caird
Thursday, 07 May 2009 00:00

Rufus Norris, Director of “Death and the King’s Horseman”, talks to Jo Caird about power, responsibility and telling African stories with English words.

Wole Soyinka, Noble-laureate and writer of “Death and the King’s Horseman”, the show currently in repertoire at the National Theatre, wrote in a note on the play that the “colonial factor” is “a catalytic event merely” and should not be the focus of the drama. In a plot that centres on a British colonial officer intervening in the ritual suicide of a Yoruba tribal chief, this advice is surely difficult to follow. Indeed, how can such a play be about anything else?

Rufus Norris sees Soyinka’s message as a “warning for anyone taking on the play to not read it in a reductive way – that it’s not just about a clash of cultures”. He believes the motivation behind “Death and the King’s Horseman” to have been “a kind of knee jerk against the rewriting of colonial history”, but that “the responsibility of leadership is the deeper message”.

“Responsibility is about doing the right thing even when it’s very difficult. If doing the right thing were easy, we’d all be doing it all the time, whether that’s not taking a £700,000 pension or remaining faithful to your partner,” Norris said. “And it applies equally to the Elesin [the eponymous Horseman], who has a responsibility to his community that means that he has to die. It also applies to Iyaloja [the head of the market women], who has to make him realise what a disaster [failing in his task] is for their community and the Yoruba universe.”

Norris becomes impassioned when talking about this subject, fixing me with his intense, intelligent gaze and leaving his sandwich untouched. He will spend his whole lunch break talking ardently to me about the show, bolting his food in the last few minutes before returning to the rehearsal room. Norris does not appear aggrieved by this however; the issues that Soyinka’s play inspires require one’s full attention.

It is this theme of responsibility that Norris believes will resonate with modern audiences: “While we continue to go into other countries with gay abandon and behave disrespectfully, the play is as current now as ever.” He has no desire for audiences to feel attacked by the production, but it’s important to Norris that they grasp the fundamental point that “there is a consequence on a cultural and a personal level to these adventures that we go on”.

Responsibility can also be understood in terms of a playwright’s responsibility to his subject. National and tribal literatures have long been acknowledged as valuable weapons in the struggle for cultural independence; they allow previously silenced voices to tell their stories and facilitate a sense of shared identity. “Death and the King’s Horseman” does exactly this, giving us access to the Yoruba tribes-people tragically misunderstood by the British colonisers in the play. It is worthy of note that the incident at the play’s heart is a true story.

The difficulty comes when we consider the fact that Soyinka writes not in Yoruba, the language of his ancestors and the play’s indigenous characters, but in English, the language of the colonisers themselves. The well-known Kenyan novelist, essayist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o (formerly James Ngugi) claims that the only way a people can fully free themselves from the vestiges of colonial rule is to reject the language of the coloniser entirely and use only the mother tongue in their national literature. Failure to do so, he says, is a “betrayal”.

Norris doesn’t agree. He sees the situation as one of compromise, attributing Soyinka’s choice of language to pragmatism. He points out that there are over 500 living languages in Nigeria alone and that by being in English, the play is made accessible not just to a Western audience, but also to Nigerian, West African and African audiences.
 
There is no doubt in his mind that the “story is being told from a Nigerian point of view. It is a story coming from the mouths of the indigenous, not the alien.” It was this feeling that led Norris to cast an all-black company. As well as the desire to avoid a reductive black-versus-white effect with the play, Norris “wanted to be clear that it’s being told from the perspective of the people to whom it happened. Or rather the people on whose land it happened.” 

Most of Norris’s company are black British, with a wide range of African and Caribbean cultures represented. He was thrilled with the “melting pot” atmosphere of the rehearsal room and regards it as particularly fitting that this “classic of African literature” should be brought to the stage by such a culturally diverse group of people.

Whitening-up black cast members to play the white characters was a potentially risky artistic decision, but Norris feels that this lends the production an air of authenticity, citing the traditional representation of white people in West African culture in anthropological support of his choice.

The director’s take on the topic of cultural ownership and how we are to present the difficult relationships of the colonial past is informed by the experiences of his childhood: his father worked in development administration in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Malaysia while Norris was growing up, allowing the boy to observe first hand the complex interactions between indigenous peoples and outsiders.

Norris underplays the effect his upbringing has had on the production, focusing instead on the “non-Western energy” he notices in all his work and on the fact that he had to do as much research into Yoruba culture “as if I’d never set foot outside Britain before”.

But Norris’s arguments belie this claim. Earlier in our conversation, Norris describes “quite a frank” talk he recently had with his mother on the reality and consequences of colonisation, both the kind practised by our ancestors and the neo-colonialism we see today. She had been upset by a friend pointing out the greed inherent in colonial pursuits and Norris felt he had to defend this stance.

“I had to say: ‘No, Mum, that was the point; we weren’t in Africa for the good of the Africans. That wasn’t the plan; we went there to get their cocoa or their slaves or their ivory, or whatever it was’.”

Listening to Norris expound on these issues, one does not get the sense that he finds his parents’ involvement in any way blameworthy, but his anger at the self-congratulatory attitude of the West is very real and appears to have directly informed his work on “Death and the King’s Horseman”.

“The liberal West can sit back and say ‘it’s awful that these people are having a terrible time; let’s send them money’ or ‘it’s awful that they’re chopping down trees and we should stop them from doing that’, but to not understand the greater picture that that’s coming from is to not take responsibility in a sense for the world as it is. There is a lack of understanding of other peoples’ perspective and that’s what we’re trying to do with this, put that story across.”

Soyinka can set his mind at ease; Norris’s production of “Death and the King’s Horseman”, far from just concerning itself with the morality of the “colonial factor” is a call for a new world of responsibility in power, an examination of our own actions, and the right of people to tell their own stories. 

“Death and the King’s Horseman” is in repertoire at the Olivier, NT, until 17 June.

 www.nationaltheatre.org.uk