Stratford’s demographics are very not Black and even less so Nigerian. The 2016 Canadian Census, found 31,053 residents, of which only 335 were Black. None of whom were Nigerian or spoke Yoruba. 24,530 of these residents noted European descent, 18, 445 of whom noted descent from the British Isles. Soyinka’ Death and the King’s Horseman, a play set in 1940s Nigeria, transports us back to the historical moment a Yoruba chief was prevented from committing ritual suicide by British colonial authorities after the death of a king, which was his most sacred duty. The production of Soyinka’s incisive commentary on colonial race relations at the Stratford festival required a majority Black cast and crew to take up residence in Stratford for the summer, at a time in which racial tensions was at the forefront of Canadian discourses. I was curious, then, when I began speaking to the cast about how this context shaped their experiences. How did they navigate living and working in a very white geography, at a time in which many Black people were particularly sensitive to the unspoken codes of racial difference given the still-fresh police killing of an unarmed Black man that had reverberated across North America? 

Bhakhomen, a young Afro-Peruvian/ Nigerian actor, who played Omosalewa in Death and the King’s Horseman, tells me that these race relations were an indelible part of her experience. ‘I remember walking with my friend, Bola and being called the N-word,’ Isi recalls, ‘I know like the director got like monkey noises yelled at him through, like just a random driver in a car.’ For Bhakhomen, who comes from downtown Toronto, Stratford felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and difficult to navigate. These experiences came to constitute a ‘tension outside the rehearsal space and inside the rehearsal space, which was really, I think, really hard to navigate for a lot of the actors and the director and the dramaturg; it was just a very intense process.’ In contrast to Bhakhomen, Anthony Santiago, who played Elesin, tells me that growing up in a mainly white small town called Sherwood Park made Stratford feel less daunting and unfamiliar. ‘So even being at Stratford, it felt like I was, I was in Sherwood Park, Alberta’ but here at least, ‘it was the first time that I’d ever been in a room where the majority of the creatives were Black, I’d never experienced that.’ Straddling these two experiences is the director’s own. M’Carthy alludes to some of these external tensions, ‘being in Stratford and having so many black people in Stratford was not easy, because there were external things that were happening that was making the lives of some of the Black people in production a bit challenging.’ 

All three agree that these tensions were not exclusive to Stratford itself. The rehearsal room also brought with it some challenges. Santiago notes that while he was happy to finally be in a room with a majority Black cast, his expectations of a harmonious utopia were dashed. ‘We are not monolithic,’ he mused as we chatted over Zoom, ‘Like any creative endeavour, there’s going to be conflict, there’s going to be, you know, different differences in personality.’ Bhakhomen was more frank. She described multiple layers of strained relations between the white and Black actors, and even the Black actors themselves. This was surprising to me; the production had seemed a well-oiled machine from the view of the audience. When I push on what might have spurred any of these, Bhakhomen, who was raised largely by her Afro-Peruvian mother, notes differential levels of access to cultural awareness of the context in which Soyinka was writing. Specifically, she had experienced some pushback when she noted out loud the complicated power relations of Elesin’s attentions toward her much younger and already betrothed character, Omosalewa. ‘I found myself like not talking anymore,’ she says laughing disbelievingly, ‘because I was afraid to be accused of being too much from the West or something.’ With the pressures of being at Stratford in 2022, against the backdrop of a still ongoing global racial reckoning, Bhakhomen believes it became harder to separate fact from fiction. The actors’ work to become the characters they were portraying and authentically represent the nuances of the context Soyinka was writing from, began to blur into their lives.  

Their work had real stakes. Santiago confessed he was frightened as a non-Nigerian playing the role. While he was not as concerned about how white people or even theatre critics might receive his performance, he told me, ‘My fear came from disappointing and possibly shaming Nigerians.’ I demurred. Nigerians as far as I knew were delighted anytime anyone took up their culture and I’d found his portrayal serious and nuanced. 

For Amaka Umeh, who took up a gender-fluid depiction of the praise singer, these fears seemed to have been assuaged. After his live conversation, Soyinka had tiptoed backstage at the request of the dramaturge, Oguntokun, where he had given an impromptu music lesson to the cast. A moment that Umeh, who left Nigeria as a child, characterizes as affirming. ‘When the professor did arrive, he just gave me props, it was never about like, oh, because you’re in a female body, you shouldn’t be doing this, or you can’t be doing this.’ 

When I asked M’Carthy about the intra-cast cultural tensions and anxieties, he paused, smiling briefly before launching into an explanation. ‘Obviously, there were some cultural frictions, because the play itself, and the Yoruba culture itself comes with a different sense of sensibility,’ he tells me, ‘Yoruba people move through the world with a different energy.’ He related that they were able to work toward a meeting point between all the different Black and African experiences in the room. For him, the cast had been able to establish a bond in the rehearsal room. Once the curtains lifted, it became more difficult to work through the projections and expectations of an engaged audience that has their own expectations. He feels that in the end, they were able to work through those challenges. ‘That was the most challenging part of putting that play on,’ he noted, ‘Reminding the actors to put their egos aside, just reminding the performers, all of them, the white and the Black, and all of them to remember what the action of the play is, and also remembering that it was more than them. Like it was bigger.’