I Gave Up Teaching My Daughter How to Speak Yoruba in Ireland

Playwright and theatre director, Bisi Adigun, is a Nigerian based in Ireland. He is also a producer, scholar and founder of Arambe Productions. In this interview with Adedayo Adejobi he talks about his love for the stage and his experience of directing on

You decided to disrupt the norm by deconstructing ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’. What influenced it and why Prof. Wole Soyinka’s work?

I set out to deconstruct Soyinka’s ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’. It’s a very good play and relevant to the political dilemma Nigeria is dealing with. The play has been done severally, and I feel the way Soyinka writes, one needs to understand his mastery of language to understand what he is saying. When I came to Nigeria last month, I stayed with some of my nieces, who are graduates of Obafemi Awolowo University. When I told them I’ll like to do ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’, they said they wouldn’t see it because they wouldn’t understand the play. This was one of the motivations. The writer has written the drama, it is the director’s work to make the play accessible to the audience. What I did was to make sure that people were not alienated by Soyinka’s mastery of English language.

Was there a theatrical approach to drive home the point?

I did my first degree in Ife. We were bombarded with Aristotle and other foreign people. I did my master’s in 1996 in Drama. When I travelled out of the country, I was in class one day when I mentioned Soyinka. Out of 12 of us in class, only one person knew who Soyinka was. That was the day I started studying Soyinka. Soyinka thinks global and uses local (images) to discuss global issues. He believes Yoruba have three stages of existence: the living, the dead and the unborn and it is those three stages that must constantly re-energise for harmony. For Soyinka, there is a stage in between those three stages; called it the fourth stage, where he believes his protagonist in Yoruba tragedy must willingly die for the benefit of the society. Out of all the books Soyinka has written, the one that epitomises the theory of the fourth stage is Eleshin-Oba, the death of the king’s horsemen. When Soyinka writes his play, he is not a director, but when he is directing his play, he locks the writer out.

Knowing how sentimental Soyinka is to his works, how did you succeed in this project?

I invited Prof. Soyinka to the opening night, and he responded saying opening night definitely out but I’ll try and make it one of the nights subsequently. So, on Monday in the morning, someone told me Prof. Soyinka is coming to see a show in the evening. I got a bit rattled, as I planned on watching the play in the audience without my actors knowing, and then I’ll take notes during the afternoon performance. When they said Prof. Soyinka was coming I got a bit all rattled up, knowing full well that Prof. Soyinka doesn’t like taking a spotlight from his plays. What he does is, he sneaks in and he sneaks out, that was what I was expecting. But this time around, he came in when I got there. I was told that he was at the restaurant. I went to greet him and his wife, we had a chat and then after then he was happy to come into the theatre even before the light went down. He sat down with his wife, so we started. He saw everything. The truth is this: Prof never shows any reaction about his performances. But everybody told me that if he doesn’t like a show, he won’t stay till the end. This time, he stayed till the end. He heard my last remark and also clapped for the actors. Everybody said that was a very good sign, and Jahman who is very close to him as well, said he enjoyed the show.

How does that make you feel?

One of my ambitions in life was to do a show at Terra Kulture. I didn’t only do a show at Terra Kulture, but to stage one of the best plays ever written by a Nigerian playwright, and then to have the man himself in the audience was a dream