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In the "Author's Note" to his play Death and the King's Horseman (1975), Wole Soyinka, while instructing the play's future producer on its correct stage interpretation, incidentally also describes the kind of tragedy he has written: its "threnodic essence," he says, is largely the metaphysical confrontation "contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind...." This description does more than guide the producer: its terms (metaphysical confrontation, human vehicle, universe of the Yoruba mind) suggest that the experience enacted is fundamentally that of the ritual.
Death and the King's Horseman (DKH) is of course about the acting out of a people's collective religious emotions and desires at a crucial moment in its politico-cultural history, all framed and structured in a ritual. It is also about the disruption of that ritual by its chief celebrant who is motivated by his own private feelings that are not in conflict with the public ones, ones that in fact derive from that same occasion. With its emphasis on the use of the human body--through dance, music, songs, and chants, a reported sexual act, and two deaths--to complement dialogue that expresses those feelings, values, and beliefs, the play's subject is also textured by aesthetic rituals. To these we may still add the playwright's statement in an interview with Chuck Mike that DKH is the second in his "trilogy of transition"(33).(1) All these internal and external evidences fully support any categorizing of the play as a ritual drama.
This certainly is how Alain Severac reads it in his essay "Soyinka's Tragedies: From Ritual to Drama." In that essay, however, Severac argues that "the drama [of DKH] remains separate from the ritual" because, in his opinion, it does not complete the third movement of the tripartite "pattern of tragic conflict (challenge of transitional abyss; disintegration; achievement of new order) as suggested by Soyinka"(27). Because of this perceived non-completion of the tripartite movement, Severac judges the play to be deficient in its service to (its) society.
I agree that in his theoretical and speculative essays on African (Yoruba) worldview ("Morality" 1-36 and "Drama" 37-60), Soyinka discovers the tripartite pattern of tragic conflict in the myths and rituals of Yoruba deities (most especially in that of Ogun) and...