A grassroots theatre production of Death and the King’s Horseman is due to grace the Crucible’s stage in early February, becoming the first ever performance of the West African play at the iconic Sheffield venue.
Utopia Theatre – a local organisation that seeks to pioneer African and Caribbean performance art and nurture young artists from the city – has also signed up non-professional actors from across South Yorkshire.
The vast majority of them have never been on stage before.
Mojisola Kareem, CEO of Utopia Theatre and an award-winning multidisciplinary artist who is directing the production, talks about working with the community ensemble for the past three months, which included learning songs in Yoruba – a language indigenous to parts of Nigeria, with around 47 million speakers.
Death and the King’s Horseman was written by the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka, who was also the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to win the prize and is by Ms Kareem’s own admission, one of her favourite playwrights.
She said: “[The play] speaks a lot to where we are in the world now. It speaks to that kind of divide, but it also speaks to some of the legacies of the past”.
Directly referring to the summer’s riots as influencing her decision to put on certain plays, Ms Kareem feels that “one of the reasons why this type of event, this type of thinking happens is because people are not taught their history.”
“The politics of art, and art, cannot be separated”.
According to the director, it is also about a sense of duty. She said: “this is one of the biggest lessons about this play.”
“There are so many leaders all over the world now where it’s just about them, they don’t have a sense of duty to their community or their people”.
The cast themselves are practicing in the Creative Hub, located in The Moor Quarter of Sheffield, and it also includes major names in African theatre such as Wale Ojo who starred in the 2023 film Breath of Life and Grange Hill, and Blood Sisters‘ Kehinde Bankole.
The vibrant and open space has been in operation for just over a year. It also plays host to the theatre company’s Youth Academy which Mojisola Kareem highlights as having started with only one member and two facilitators.
“We could have said ‘ah, this is not going to work, people are not going to come’. People were telling us then that ‘oh, Sheffield hasn’t had this kind of offer in such a long time’. That is kind of the history of the city where things are given to our community, but very quickly, it doesn’t work out and it’s withdrawn from them. So, they’ve learnt to limit their expectations and not feel that anything is going to work.”
“I said whatever happens, we will persevere”
– Mojisola Kareem, Utopia Theatre’s CEO and director of the upcoming performance of Death and the King’s Horseman
The Youth Academy now has 25 regular attendees.
Looking to the near future, Utopia Theatre intend to take Death and the King’s Horseman on an international tour after its showing at the Crucible.
There are also plans in the work to build on this collaboration with Sheffield Theatres, by way of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth “set in Yorubaland”, itself an allegory of “what happens to people when they become drunk with power”.
Ms Kareem smiled and said “so, we are continuing in exactly the same kind of trajectory”.
Walking back through the Hub, past sand-yellow walls dashed with proverbs like “tomorrow belongs to people who prepare for it today”, meticulous artwork and posters cataloguing the company’s portfolio of work, there is a sense that Utopia Theatre is ready to take 2025 by the reins.
