Dayna's Blog: IYT and the King's Horseman

IYT Member Dayna Kellman writes about Islington Youth Theatre's advance-mission to the National Theatre on Saturday - to see the Olivier Stage for the first time and watch Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka:

Islington Youth Theatre were at the National Theatre for the first time, where we’ll be performing on Monday 6th of July. Yayyy!

The performance we saw was called Death and the King's Horseman. It was based on living in Nigeria in the 1940’s.

As Elesin Oba dances through the closing marketplace, flirting with the women, pursued by his praise-singer and an entourage of drummers, he promises to honour the ancient Yoruba custom of ritual suicide and so accompany his ruler on the final journey. But a life so rich is hard to leave, and this is a British colony where such customs are not tolerated, no matter how sacred.

I think that the performance was so exciting and vibrant. To sit in the audience to watch it was really a great experience.

To be honest the first act was a bit of a drag with lots of talking and detail on how the King has died, but towards the end I understood how interesting and informative it was to listen to. To see this performance shows how Nigeria was in the 1940’s which I was interested in as it shows some information I never knew about before.

I really enjoyed the performance and to see the stage the way it was used was amazing, and now I really am anxious to get on to that stage for our performance and then to finally see how we are going to make our performance bigger and more entertaining.

I hope everyone who reads this are coming to the play because if you don’t you really will not be supporting our “Success”.

And definitely go and see Death and the King's Horseman

Thanks for reading,


Dayna - aka Feelgood