The Nigerian Nobel laureate’s story of a royal servant condemned to kill himself after his master’s death has lost none of its enigmatic appeal

Sheffield is in luck. The Crucible theatre next month offers a rare staging of an extraordinary play: Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka. I saw Rufus Norris’s brilliant production at the National Theatre in 2009 and included the work in my book on The 101 Greatest Plays, yet even now I am still wrestling with its ultimate meaning. Ambivalence, however, is for me one of the true tests of theatrical quality.

You can’t begin to understand the work without knowing a little of Soyinka’s life apart from the obvious facts that he is a 90-year-old Nobel laureate and Nigeria’s most famous writer. From the start, his life represents a fusion of opposites. He was steeped in Yoruba tradition with its multiple gods yet his parents were passionate Christian converts. Soyinka’s studies took him from Ibadan to Leeds, where he came under the tutelage of the scholar G Wilson Knight who focused on the mythical and miraculous elements in Shakespeare.

Death and the King’s Horseman is at the Crucible, Sheffield, 3-8 February