Wole Oguntokun: The Trouble with Nigerian Theatre

On set

A thirteen-man cast and I just returned from performing the London showing of Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, on a stage built in honour of the bard himself. Shakespeare’s Globe is a replica of the one William Shakespeare practised on as an actor and playwright, and it played host between late April and early June to thirty-seven international touring companies from around the world including the Nigerian-based “Renegade Theatre” of which I am artistic director.

The play was staged twice at the globe, meeting near-frenzied responses from a crowd made up of Africans and Europeans and even though it was in the Yoruba language (none of the thirty-seven plays was in English) the audiences at both presentations showed their appreciation. The cast had to take a bow four times after the presentation on the final day, sent back on stage each time by the Globe’s resident stage managers, Becky and Adele, who stood backstage studying the audience’s moods through television monitors.

At the end of it all, The Director of the Festival, Tom Bird, came backstage to hug cast members, later describing the play as “an unforgettable coup” and a “mind-blowing show”. The Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe since 2006, Dominic Dromgoole, came backstage also, pumping hands enthusiastically with cast members. He told me a few times, ‘You must be exceedingly proud of yourself’. I was.

At the reception organised for the cast by the Globe which went on till the early hours of the morning, Dominic described us to a jammed venue as having put fire in the belly of the play, and blood in its veins, making it unlike any production of The Winter’s Tale he had ever had the opportunity to see. Some audience members who had bought tickets for every play in the Cultural Olympiad (they were called Globe Olympians) told us of how highly placed they considered our production amongst all the shows they had seen. One said she had not seen an encore like ours in watching plays for twenty years at the Globe.

Sometime between May and June last year, I had commissioned the Oyo State-based Chief Tade Ipadeola to translate Shakespeare’s play into Yoruba but then came the problem of what to do with the translation. From a play notorious for being one of Shakespeare’s most difficult and which has always been known to have a sad and wistful air about it, I decided to make the two Kings (Leontes and Polixenes), the Yoruba gods, ‘Sango’ and ‘Ogun’, and Hermione, wife of Leontes, ‘Oya’, the Yoruba goddess of the whirlwind. I took a non-linear approach to the play, starting it in the middle instead and in the process removing one of the most improbable stage directions ever written by Shakespeare, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’. For one, there are no bears in Yoruba land and we settled to have armed bandits attack Antigonus (Agbomabiwon) the King’s messenger instead. Unlike Shakespeare’s end and our commissioned translation that had Hermione come back to life and everyone as happy as they could be, I directed she should first come to life and then become a statue once more, seeing that in many of our stories, there are always ‘just deserts’. In this case, it would be Leontes (Sango) learning the true consequences of his unpardonable behaviour.

Professor Julie Sanders, Chair in English Literature and Drama as well as Head of the School of English in the Faculty of Arts at Nottingham University in her published review, described our production as ‘a show that reworked, rethought and intervened in Shakespeare’s play in all kinds of exciting and memorable ways’. She described cast member Sunkanmi Adebayo who played Camillo (Adeagbo) as having put up a ‘crowd-winning performance’, Motunrayo Orobiyi as singing ‘glorious framing songs’, and wrote that the interpretation of ‘Autolycus’ (Ikoko), “in a gender-bending, audience-challenging performance by Anike Alli-Hakeem was a brilliant interpretation”

According to her, ‘the Globe danced, sang and answered back quite willingly on Friday night leaving the audience with an experience that stayed as they headed for a bus back along Thameside...leaving the audience with energy and with a different kind of choreography in their bodies’

In the UK’s Guardian Newspaper of Wednesday the 30th of May, Imogen Tilden’s review wrote that ‘despite a startling twist, the Nigerian production of Shakespeare’s late romance translates it into something rich and strange, while keeping its magical essence at its heart’. According to her, ‘Leontes (Olawale Adebayo) is a powerful presence and hugely impressive as a King while Hermione (Kehinde Bankole) shines with inner and outer beauty; so winning are her smiles, so generous her attentions to Polixenes, that you can almost sympathise with Leontes’ jealous fantasies’. She considered Hermione coming back to life and then turning back to a statue as ‘the most dazzling theatrical coup of the play’

Mark Hudson, multiple-award winning writer and journalist, described the play on www.theartsdesk.com as being about ‘cultural discovery for non-Yoruba speakers, paralleled by trying to keep up with the action’ and went on to say ‘it was a dynamic interpretation that blurred the boundaries of drama, music and dance’

From all over the world, there have been messages of congratulations. In Lagos on Sunday the 20th of May, just before we departed for London, we had put up the show to work out its kinks in collaboration with the British Council and the Muson Centre and had been pleased at how proud the audience was of us and what we would be showing to the world.

On the closing night in London, the cast and I were congratulated by everyone we met at the reception and we all were giddy with the exhilaration of having put up a greatly appreciated show. Undergraduate and Postgraduate Nigerian students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) told us of how proud they were, and up and down the venue, theatre lovers celebrated us and we revelled in it.

What, you may ask, does all this have to do with the trouble in Nigerian theatre? I received a call late on Sunday the 10th of June from Winter’s Tale cast member Anike Alli-Hakeem that there had been a ‘vindictive’ review of our London play published in the Guardian in Nigeria that day written by one Lookman Sanusi. I was unable to connect any real theatrical problems to ‘The Winter’s Tale’ showings in Lagos or London but Anike had not been far off the mark in describing the ‘review’ that way. The piece written by a former dramatist with an obscure career in children’s theatre at one time in Lagos was vitriolic to say the least, stating among other things that we did not use the space of the Globe well, a bit odd as the Artistic Director of the Globe, Mr. Dromgoole, the Festival Director, Tom Bird, and many other members of staff of the Globe Theatre could not get over telling us how well we took possession of the stage and had made it our own. The condemning article using a lot of theatrical jargon made me wonder if it was the same play received so well that was being described.

He wrote condescendingly about cast members being more excited about visiting London than about being on stage, a bit silly, seeing quite a number of them had visited the United Kingdom before. Basically, the point of the article was for me to learn from him and his likes. This was ironic as years before this reviewer decided to leave the practice of theatre behind and resettle on distant shores; he had asked me for advice about finding audiences for his plays, as he had staged several that would often have only one person in attendance.

Still, I was puzzled. There are no perfect shows and there is not one above criticism, but this article had been crude in its savagery on the one hand while the organisers, reviewers and audience members at the festival in London had gushed over the play on the other. The views were two opposite ends of the spectrum and simple logic made it clear one side could not have any idea what it was saying.

However, the truth came to me as I mulled over these very different opinions on the same play, no matter that the article our play had been savaged in was a minority report. While anxious for financial support for ‘The Winter’s Tale’ months ago, I had informed the Globe I would be looking for sponsorship back home, a request the organisation readily agreed to as long as the businesses of my eventual sponsors did not clash with those of their own sponsors.

A close friend and collaborator of the caustic-penned reviewer who likes to consider himself a person in the know where theatre is concerned had approached me in Lagos asking to be ‘technical director’ and saying he could help get sponsorship for a cut of the sum. When he returned with the terms of support he had ‘worked out’ with the ministry of the arts and culture of one of the Western States, it was to declare that my theatre company would be paid ten million naira as sponsorship (the equivalence of forty thousand pounds sterling) , a lot of money by all standards. He went on to introduce me to the Special Assistant to the Commissioner in charge of Culture-related affairs in that state. Just as the cast and I started to rejoice at our company’s stroke of good fortune, a condition was added (fourteen conditions, actually). My ‘benefactor’ informed I was to add fourteen extra people to my cast and crew which was already fifteen men-strong when I went to apply for visas, an act that would have swelled our numbers to twenty-nine. According to him, ten of the additional fourteen would be performing members of the arts and culture council of the said State’s Ministry of Culture and the remaining four would be officials of the ministry sent to “accompany” their members. It was a crazy request and I balked at a doubling of the cast size I had agreed with the Globe Theatre after intense discussions, for actors that would be chosen on my behalf by unknown people.

One didn’t have to be a genius to recognise this for the scam it was, an attempt to use my show as a vehicle to transport people who had nothing to do with the play to the United Kingdom.  The gentleman friend of my reviewer who had brokered this deal on my behalf without consulting me on the terms asked when he saw I wasn’t willing to go ahead, “Don’t you need money?” He tried to persuade me that the Cultural Olympiad and World Shakespeare Festival which “The Winter’s Tale” was a part of, was the perfect vehicle to get visas for his people. In this arrangement with the State, he would earn at least the same amount that he was offering my theatre company as sponsorship.

I could understand any organisation or government wanting to use the World Shakespeare Festival as a podium to express its interest in the arts, but to ask me to include fourteen of its staff members on my team? I was ready to put the sponsor’s name on t-shirts, place them on printed brochures and roll-up banners, perform at designated halls of their choice, put their logos on our website, shout their name from every rooftop I could find but not accept “human trafficking” terms that would jeopardise my company’s future as an international touring one that could be trusted.

I rejected his offer by e-mail in February, (Yahoo! Mail automatically saves sent messages), informed my cast and crew of the decision I had taken and then told Tom Bird, the Festival Director at the Globe, in person, of the attempt to hijack the Nigerian production. Tom (and his colleagues) could not get his head around it and kept on asking himself, “Why?” It was a good thing I chose the higher road. In the month of May and barely two weeks to our showing at the Globe, the British High Commission rejected the Entertainer Visitor visa applications for all fifteen genuine cast members.  It took the combined strength of the British Council, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Olympic Committee in London to make the High Commission consider re-visiting the denials. A week to our opening in London, the High Commission called to inform me it had rescinded its own decisions and I was to travel to Abuja to pick up the visas. There would have been no explanation for the doubling of the cast size either to the High Commission or to the Globe itself if it had been an application with thirty people as my “dealer” had tried to persuade me to agree to.

I still blanch at the thought of how close it had been. The trouble with Nigerian theatre is that visas are not issued us to display our strength in other places because the issuing authorities know there is someone in the background scheming to hijack genuine applications as was attempted in our cases. I have received calls from places as far as Lithuania and the United States seeking to verify the authenticity of drama troupes seeking to take work out. The trouble with Nigerian theatre is that some here will ensure the outside world closes doors of opportunity for other practitioners because of misuse by these same people who “claim” to be veteran practitioners. This man knew the bridge of opportunity for other practitioners would blow up after him if he could manage to get his own extra hands across but didn’t really care.

The trouble with us is that we blame Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Femi Osofisan and that generation for not showing us how they became giants on the world stage but the mindless desire for self-promotion by some in our midst today far exceeds anything the older generation of dramatists can begin to fathom. They shrink away instinctively, knowing we are not driven by passion but by a burning lust for advancement at whatever cost.

Wole Oguntokun

I made real enemies because I did the right thing in rejecting a criminal offer while simultaneously dashing this man’s hopes for immense monetary gain. When I see acerbic and unwarranted comments on the pages of newspapers made by those who are close comrades of my “new enemies”, I remember what the trouble with Nigerian Theatre really is.

I might have become ten million naira richer but the High Commission would probably not have given a visa to another Nigerian theatre practitioner for ten years after the extra fourteen they planned to foist on me would have scattered across the hills of Britain. In our case, the original crew of fourteen went to the United Kingdom, put up a grand show and returned at the same time. So much for people who were only excited to be in England.

I regard this review as the equivalent of a drive-by shooting, a concerted retaliation for not towing a crooked line, and I submit that as long as certain people are in the Nigerian Theatre industry, the day will come when practitioners who attempt to do the right thing will be shot at some crowded shopping mall as payback for not obeying extortionist demands.

There are many problems with Nigerian Theatre, but Renegade Theatre is not part of these problems. We will have many more great shows at home and abroad irrespective of one malicious pen.

Wole Oguntokun runs the Renegade Theatre Company based in Lagos. He facilitated a workshop for Theatre Directors at the Garden City Literary Festival, 2011.