Death and the King's Horseman

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.

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.