In October 2025, a new award will be presented in Lagos to a young, fearless visionary of the theatre. Its name will be the Wole Oguntokun Legacy Award, a testament to a man who, until his untimely death in March 2024, was not merely a participant in Nigerian theatre but one of its chief architects.
Oguntokun, a playwright, director, and lawyer, devoted his life to a singular mission: building the platforms, spaces, and opportunities for Nigerian stories to be told, both at home and on the world’s most prestigious stages.
His career was a masterclass in cultural bridge-building. Trained in law and humanitarian studies, he applied a strategic mind to the arts. In 2007, he initiated “Theatre@Terra” at Lagos’s Terra Kulture, creating what he rightly called “Nigeria’s most consistent venue for theatre” by staging a professional play every single Sunday for three and a half years without interruption.
This was not just production; it was a deliberate institution designed to combat the scarcity of performance spaces and build a reliable audience. Later, he established the Theatre Republic, another vital hub for artists. He understood that for theatre to thrive, it required foundations.
Oguntokun’s vision, however, was never parochial. He propelled Nigerian theatre onto the global map with a series of pioneering firsts. In 2012, he directed a Yoruba-language adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at London’s Globe Theatre as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, the sole West African production in the event.
The following year, he broke new ground again, becoming the first Nigerian to direct and produce an original Nigerian play, The Waiting Room, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He repeated this feat in 2014 with The Tarzan Monologues, steadfastly showcasing Nigerian narratives on one of the world’s largest arts platforms.
His creative work was deeply engaged with social justice, giving voice to the marginalised and confronting difficult national histories. He headed the team that adapted Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for Nigerian audiences, creating V Monologues – The Nigerian Story.
His powerful play The Emancipation of Yankee Oluwale, which won the Young-Howze Award for Dramatic Writing in 2021, examined a real-life case of racist brutality in Britain. Perhaps most poignantly, he wrote and directed The Chibok Girls: Our Story, a production that featured young women who had escaped the infamous abduction, transforming recent trauma into resonant art.
Colleagues and observers have noted that Oguntokun almost single-handedly revived contemporary urban theatre culture in Nigeria. As one tribute stated, he made “young Lagos guy/girls started to think of theatre as perfect for a date”. He was a mentor, a discoverer of talent, and a demanding artistic director whose companies, Renegade Theatre and Theatre Planet Studios, became synonymous with excellence.
Wole Oguntokun’s legacy, therefore, is dual in nature. It lives on in the enduring bodies of work—his plays, his groundbreaking productions of works by Wole Soyinka and others, and the annual “Season of Soyinka” he founded.
More indelibly, it persists in the very infrastructure of Nigerian theatre: the spaces he created, the audiences he cultivated, and the pathway he forged from Lagos to London and Edinburgh. The award that now bears his name seeks to honour those who embody his spirit. In doing so, it ensures that the stage he spent a lifetime building will never be empty.
