Death and the King’s Horseman at the Stratford Festival

In the summer of 2022, I visit the City of Stratford twice. To see Death and the King’s Horseman in early September, and before that, to hear Professor Wole Soyinka speak in July. Both events were billed as a part of the Stratford Festival, an annual theatre festival originally set up to showcase plays by William Shakespeare. Founded to revitalize the Ontario town of Stratford’s struggling economy in 1952, by playing on Stratford, Ontario’s name—a nod to Shakespeare’s birthplace—the festival has since gone on to train generations of Canada’s theatre professionals and been featured in the biographies of some of Canada’s greatest actors. A major cultural force in Canada, the festival has an international reputation as North America’s largest classical repertory theatre company. It generates over $140 million and draws almost half a million people to Stratford each year. And in 2022, it was featuring a play by Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright whose outsized influence in African theatre and initials (W.S.) often prompts Shakespearean comparisons, as one of it principal draws.