Wole Oguntokun (Oluwolé Oguntokun) a Nigerian playwright, dramaturge and director is the artistic director of Theatre Planet Studios and Renegade Theatre as well as a member of the board of Theaturtle, a Canadian theatre company. He is also a theatre administrator and newspaper columnist.
Education
Oguntokun holds a Bachelor of Laws from the Obafemi Awolowo University, as well as Master of Laws (LL.M) and Master of Humanitarian and Refugee Studies degrees, from the University of Lagos. He has been called to the Nigerian Bar.
Theatre
Wole is dramaturge, culture consultant and dialect coach for the Stratford Festival's 2022 production of Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka. He was the Stratford Festival's designated host for Soyinka in his July 2022 visit to the Festival's Meighen Forum. He was dramaturge and played the lead role of Elesin Oba in Soulpepper Theatre / Stratford Festival's Canadian production of Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman as a part of Soulpepper's Around the World in 80 plays project in June 2021.
In February 2021, he won the Young-Howze award for Dramatic Writing of the year for his play The Emancipation of Yankee Oluwale, based on the trial of two English policemen in 1969 for the death of the Nigerian migrant David Oluwale.
Oguntokun directed his company, Renegade Theatre, in its 2019 production of his play The Chibok Girls: Our Story at the Cross Currents Festival in Washington DC in tandem with Soyinka's premiere of his new work A Humanist's Ode for Chibok, Leah.
He was a 2018 Global Fellow of the New York-based International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), a fellowship he was also awarded in 2015 and 2016. He founded and was artistic director of the Theatre Republic a Lagos-based performing arts hub opened in September 2016 which provided production and rehearsal spaces for theatre and dance companies, musicians and visual artists while also artistic director of Renegade Theatre, a Nigerian performing arts company.
Oguntokun moderated the conversation between Soyinka and the audience at the award of the Europe Theatre Special Prize in Rome in December 2017.
He wrote and directed the theatrical production of The Chibok Girls: Our Story which premiered at the Muson Centre, Lagos, from 18 to 20 December 2015. The performances, partly supported by the Delegation of the European Union to the Federal Republic of Nigeria and to the Economic Community of West African States, featured three of the school girls who escaped after being abducted by the insurgent group, alongside professional actors. The production was thereafter invited to the 2017 edition of the Ubumuntu Arts Festival in Kigali, Rwanda where it was performed on the 16th of July.
He emerged as a player on the Nigerian Theatre landscape between September and December 1998 with his productions of his satirical stage drama Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, a lampoon of the Nigerian military in governance.
He has written and directed plays including Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka in May 2002; Rage of the Pentecost – August 2002; Ladugba! – September 2002; and The Other Side – November 2002.
His other plays include "Piper Piper", his adaptation of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" in March 2003; and Gbanja Roulette, in May and July 2003.
In December 2003, he featured Taiwo Ajai-Lycett in his stage play The Inheritors. He also wrote Prison Chronicles in March 2004, The Other Side starring Kate Henshaw-Nuttall in November 2005; The Sound and The Fury in April 2006; The Inheritors featuring Joke Silva in August 2006, and Anatomy of a Woman featuring Stella Damasus in March 2007.
He has produced and directed plays by other playwrights including The Trials of Brother Jero by Soyinka, Femi Osofisan's Once upon Four Robbers, Bode Asiyanbi, and Reagan Payne.
In July 2007, Oguntokun initiated a collaboration with the Arts Centre known as Terra Kulture, on Victoria Island, Lagos, and commenced the "Theatre@Terra", becoming its founding producer and artistic director and turning it into one of Nigeria's most consistent venues for Theatre, with plays produced every Sunday at the venue.