Every time the court historian turns up, he has a new list of phenomena to report. Arokin (Toyin Oshinaike) brings news of a flying elephant, a gorilla with a tortoise shell and a woman with vipers for hair.
There has been a lot of this since Aderemi (Deyemi Okanlawon) returned from the battlefield and heard his wife’s prophetic dream. Telling her husband she saw a crown placed upon his head, Oyebisi (Kehinde Bankole) sets him on a course from warrior to despot.
Oladipo Agboluaje’s play is shaped by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but rooted in 19th-century west Africa. Where the witches of the original can seem like a plot device – a means to trigger Macbeth’s ambition – here, the supernatural is all-encompassing. “I am doing the bidding of the gods,” says Aderemi, with conviction.
In Mojisola Kareem’s production for Utopia and Sheffield Theatres, Esu (Patrice Naiambana) is a deity as real in his pointy cap and red rags as the amulets and shells that cast spells over the characters. It helps set this story in a mythic Yoruba landscape, one that makes the inhabitants seem like temporary players in an eternal struggle.
Okanlawon and Bankole make a credible double act. He is a modest kind of soldier, likable until, suddenly, he is not. She is as devoted as she is determined. He is the son of a blacksmith. She was enslaved. They have good reason for their ambition.
Good to see Oyebisi sticking it out to the end, with no intervening madness; but in setting himself free from Shakespeare’s words, Agboluaje also lessens the psychological insight. Aderemi is not given to reflection and, as the play goes on, it seems less about him than about the social impact of his actions.
The playwright shifts the focus to the politics of succession, the royal houses negotiating their corners while trying to contain a headstrong leader. As the throne dangles in midair, suspended by streams of blood on Kevin Jenkins’s set, this is a play about power and governance. “It must never happen again,” says a survivor of the carnage, a warning we could apply to the demagogues of today.
At Crucible, Sheffield, until 7 February. Then touring
