Death and the King's Horseman (Modern Classics) - Hardcover

Wole Soyinka

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1474260764 ISBN 13: 9781474260763

Publisher: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017

Synopsis

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level.

'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian

"A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)

About this title

Review:

This rich turbulent piece, which starts as folk comedy and ends as Greek tragedy, takes on board an abundance of ideas: identity, tradition, the passage from life to death . . . Soyinka's play is as much philosophical as political. --Michael Billington, Guardian, 9.4.09

Based on events in 1940s Nigeria, the story attains a more classically tragic power in showing two forces unable to understand each other. On one side there is the Yoruba culture, in which the death of a king is followed by the suicide of his favoured liegeman . . . on the other, the powers that be with their contrary code that suicide is illegal and to be prevented, even if it costs more lives. --Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, 13.4.09

Wole Soyinka's play is one of the great creations of twentieth-century theatre: it has the fire, grandeur, cruelty and humanity of Greek tragedy, the moral cutting edge of modern political thinking, and the African writer's take on his own people's values: loving mocking, ironical and ruthlessly observant . . . Soyinka writes with the moral ambivalence and relentless questioning of Shakespeare. --John Peter, Sunday Times, 19.4.09

About the Author:

Wole Soyinka - playwright, novelist, poet and polemical essayist - was born in Nigeria in 1934. Educated there and at Leeds University, he worked in the British theatre before returning to West Africa in 1960. In 1986 he became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays include The Jero Plays (1960, 1966), The Road (1965), The Lion and the Jewel (1966), Madmen and Specialists (1971), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), A Play with Giants (1984), A Scourge of Hyacinths (1991) and From Zia, With Love (1992). His novels include The Interpreters (1973) and Season of Anomy (1980). His collections of poetry include Idanre (1967), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) - composed during a period of over two years in prison without trial, most of it in solitary confinement - and Mandela's Earth (1990). In 1988, his collection of essays on literature and culture, Art, Dialogue and Outrage was published. He has also written three autobiographical volumes Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay (1989) and Ibadan (1994). Since 2007 he has been Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1474260764
• ISBN 13: 9781474260763
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96