Fàdákà

One of the strangest privileges of being a playwright is that you spend a considerable part of your life worrying about people who do not exist. You give them names. Childhoods. Bad habits. Secrets. You decide what they fear, what they desire, how they speak when they are angry, what they refuse to say when they are afraid. You know who broke their heart. You know the lie they tell everyone and the more dangerous lie they tell themselves. Then, if you are fortunate, an actor walks into a rehearsal room and this person who has existed only inside your head begins to breathe. I have written more than sixty plays and screenplays over the years, so I must have created hundreds of characters by now. Some have stayed with audiences longer than I expected. I still hear people talk about characters from Ayanfe, the faith-based musical we staged at the OAU Amphitheatre in 2015. Last year, Daughters of the Dance gave me another collection of women whose stories audiences carried home with them. A playwright probably shouldn't have favourite children. Unfortunately, I do. Two of the most fascinating characters I have created are Integer and Ms. Fit, the central characters in my new play, In the Room Where It Happened. Integer fascinates me because of the distance between the man the world encounters and the boy still hiding inside him. Brilliant once. Broken somewhere along the road. Formidable in public, much less certain in private. Even his name carries an arithmetic of what life can do to possibility. Ms. Fit comes from another wound entirely: displacement, language, loneliness, identity, and the exhausting business of trying to belong somewhere that keeps reminding you that you arrived from somewhere else. This Saturday, Integer and Misfit leave my laptop and the privacy of my imagination. They meet the world. I cannot wait for you to meet them too. In the Room Where It Happened premieres tomorrow at Alliance Française, Lagos.

My bet is that human beings still like being together. That is why I have never been particularly worried about the death of theatre. Film arrived. Theatre survived. Television arrived. Theatre survived. Streaming placed thousands of films inside our pockets. Theatre survived. Then the pandemic taught us that almost anything could be mediated through a screen. Almost. The moment the world opened again, we returned to concerts, conferences, churches, festivals and football stadiums. Technology had expanded our options, but it had not cured us of our need for presence. And presence is theatre’s stubborn advantage. The actor is breathing in the same room as you. A line is spoken once and disappears. Someone improvises. An audience laughs longer than expected and the actor waits. A silence enters the room and, somehow, two hundred strangers understand it together. Nothing can be rewound or corrected afterwards. Everyone present becomes a witness to something that will never happen in precisely that way again. I work in film too, and I love what film makes possible. This is not a contest between mediums. Zoom did not kill conferences; it expanded the vocabulary of gathering. Film did not kill theatre; it expanded the vocabulary of storytelling. After nearly two decades of writing and directing for the stage, I remain convinced that human beings will always need places where imagination happens collectively, bodily and in real time. This Saturday, we open one such room with the premiere of In the Room Where It Happened. Produced by @Fadaka_ You may eventually see pictures and snippets online. But there is only one way to experience theatre as theatre was intended: You have to be in the room where it happens. 📆 Saturday, 15 August, 2026. 📍 Alliance Française, Ikoyi, Lagos. 🎟️ 3:00pm - tix.africa/discover/in-the-r… 🎫 6:00pm - tix.africa/discover/itrwit_f…

I’ve spent much of my adult life telling stories. Plays, screenplays, poems and essays. Theatre, film, documentary, publishing. Characters imagined in solitude that somehow found bodies, voices and audiences. Storytelling has remained one of the deepest threads running through my life. This week, another story leaves the page. My new stage play, In the Room Where It Happened, premieres in Lagos. It is intimate, unsettling, sometimes funny, deeply human — and introduces two of the most fascinating characters I have ever created: Integer and Misfit. I’ve lived with this story for a while. Now, I’m ready to share the room with you. IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED. Come experience it with us. 📍 Alliance Française, Ikoyi, Lagos. 📅 Saturday, 15th August, 2026. 🎟️ fadaka.org