Oguntokun: Painful demise of theatre’s revivalist

The founder of Renegade Theatre and Theatre Republic died on Wednesday, March 27, in Canada.

Igi ti o to ki pe ni igbo. That is, straight trees don’t last long in the forest, the Yoruba say in lamenting talent cut down by death in its prime. This saying immediately came to mind late Wednesday evening when my editor and mentor, Molara Wood, messaged that the resourceful writer and theatre producer, Wole Oguntokun, founder of Renegade Theatre, had passed.

I was shocked. Though Oguntokun had relocated to Canada, he was still in theatre. Once you catch the bug, it never leaves you. Trained as a lawyer, he caught the bug early and stayed in the theatre, beginning in the late 1990s.

I wasn’t close to Oguntokun, also known as Laspapi, his pen name, but I followed his work, including his weekly ‘Girl Whisperer’ column in the Guardian on Sunday and productions, closely. He was gifted, but he didn’t keep his talent to himself. He uplifted others.

Between late 2008 and the last quarter of 2011, when the NEXT Newspaper folded, we featured his works on our 16-page arts pull-out edited by the eagle-eyed Ms Wood. Even if we didn’t want to, our junior colleague, Obidike Okafor, wouldn’t let us rest. He went to Terra Kulture, where the late producer frequently staged his plays and would regale us with stories on Mondays.

The playwright whose credits include, ‘The Waiting Room’, ‘Legend of Moremi’, ‘The Chibok Girls: Our Story’, ‘Anatomy of a Woman’, ‘Prison Chronicles’, ‘The Queen of the Night’, ‘The Eagle King’, ‘The Tarzan Monologues’, and ‘Gbanja Roulette’ had a never-say-die spirit. In 2012, he took his production, ‘Itan Oginintin’, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’, to the Shakespeare Cultural Olympiad at the Globe Theatre in London.  He also staged his ‘The Waiting Room’ at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013 and ‘The Tarzan Monologues’ at the same venue in 2014.

He had written and produced all these works and more before his passing on Wednesday, March 27, incidentally the World Theatre Day.

His passing at 56 is another sad loss for Nigerian theatre because Oguntokun was an institution. Vibrant and humble, he never claimed undue credits. Oguntokun quietly went about his business, comfortable in his skin and working for the greater good.

All these qualities endeared him to players in the theatre space, who are mourning a talent gone too soon and insist on proper documentation of Oguntokun’s sterling contributions to Nigerian theatre.

Ms Wood said, “I was for many years a keen follower of Wole’s theatre activities, and I was amazed at how he remained just as active after his relocation to Canada, putting on new theatre productions, seeming to have established strong new partnerships with Canadian art institutions, building a new community of creatives in a strange land, always flying the flag of Nigerian theatre. Even over there, he ruled the roost and carved his niche. We must tell Wole’s story and the pivotal role he played in the theatre resurgence, which has hundreds of spectators buying tickets to see musicals in these times.

“We must talk/write about his productions at the MUSON, Lagos Theatre Festival, his annual and valiant A Season of Soyinka, The Tarzan Monologues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – and so many other exploits. We should not allow the new luminaries of the Arts scene and their ahistorical followers to pretend that no one has done anything of note until now because that is happening in all Nigerian art – music, film, journalism, and literature. The people who are ‘hot’ now are the only ones acknowledged to have done anything.”

The lawyer and writer Deji Toye alluded to the same in his tribute to the late playwright. “Somehow, you knew he was doing an important work when you went to see his plays in the late 90s/2000s. But I know when I first realised how essential it was. It was about 10 years ago, during one of the early editions of the Lagos Theatre Festival. Taking a look at the festival brochure, I noted that everybody who was anybody– from festival director to directors of specific productions on schedule to casting leads and key productions hands– were graduates of either Wole Oguntokun’s Renegade Theatre or Segun Adefila’s Crown Troupe. At that moment, it struck me that the relatively vibrant Lagos theatre scene we were beginning to see at the time had largely rested on the shoulders of these two gentlemen. It occurred to me that we had been witnesses to history–to a generational turn in Nigeria’s theatre culture–those of us who saw those grinding productions under Crown Troupe’s Bookarteria and Renegade Theatre’s set-up of Theatre@Terra.”

Also acknowledging his contributions, the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, in a statement by its Secretary General, Makinde Adeniran, wrote, “Both as writer and director of theatre, WO shaped lives, inspired lives, mended lives… NANTAP celebrates this quintessential creative genius who single-handedly held performance activity in the face of all when most practitioners were down to nothing during the despicable rule of late General Sani Abacha.”

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