Nobel prizes aren't given for nothing

4.5*

Wow! A powerful play based on a real-life event. To quote from Soyinka's Author's Note at the beginning of my edition,
"   The bane of themes of this genre is that they are no sooner employed creatively than they acquire the facile tag of 'clash of cultures', a prejudicial label which, quite apart from its frequent misapplication, presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous one, on the actual soil of the latter. ... It is thanks to this kind of perverse mentality that I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency, and to direct his vision instead to the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play's threnodic essence."

With this in my mind as I read the play, I tried to not focus on the conflict between the English colonial government and the Yoruba natives but on the transition between life and death that the King's Horseman is facing.

Just saw a gorgeous, heartbreaking, memorable production in Ashland and came home and read it. Wonderful on the page, too. An indictment in poetry. Not a bleak tragedy, an exuberant, enraged tragedy.