TRIBUTE: Bayo Oduneye: The “Tramp” who made good

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His plan after the National Troupe assignment is, however, to establish “my own little institution – have a theatre, where productions can be happening all through. And then have young people around me in a small kind of academy.”

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The members of the panel looked at him. What he had just told them warranted his immediate dismissal. He was asked instead to step out while they consulted among themselves.Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,

When he moved over to Manchester, he spent almost all his time poring over theatre books at the library. The more he did this, the more he was determined to change his course. He was like a tramp. For one year, he lived in the streets of Paris without a future to look forward to. It was a carefree life. He mixed with street urchins and vagrants. Then one day an uncle of his ran into him and was shocked. They had been trying to locate him for a whole year and here he was almost in rags!Asked why he chose the kind of life he was living, he poured out his soul.

At the Academy, he chose the behind-the-scene area of stage management. It is a specialised aspect of theatre that requires discipline and level-headedness. It demands meticulously taking down notes of the director’s blockings and liaising with the lighting designer, set designer, props man, make-up artist among others.

Life was good for him in America after his course. He got a job as workshop director in an all-back theatre company in New Orleans. With good pay and other perks, he soon rose to become the artistic director.But the urge to come home was stronger than the incentive to stay on in the United States. “Wherever I am, I hate to be in the minority,” he explains.

Bayo Oduneye had to find a way around the problem. He sent the directing students to secondary schools in the town and others to their halls of residence to produce and direct plays which the lecturers went round to supervise. The coup of 1975 led by the late General Murtala Mohammed put paid to all the preparations for FESTAC ’77, as the new strongman said he had no time for such a fiesta. With the emergence of General Olusegun Obasanjo, however, FESTAC ’77 came back to the front burner and so did Mr Oduneye. He just got to his office one morning and on his mail box was a letter from the organisers.

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