Oladipo Agboluaje

Oladipo is an established professional playwright, his work includes plays such as The Estate, Iya Ile (First Wife) and The Christ of Coldharbour Lane which have all been shown at Soho Theatre. His work has also been enjoyed at Oval House, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Unicorn Theatre and in 2010 he wrote Say Goodbye for BBC Radio 3.

Oladipo has a very warm presence. I would describe him as calm and relaxed, he also has a lovely sense of humour. 

Can you tell me a little about your background?

I was born here and went to Nigeria at the age of nine and then came back to England in my mid twenties.

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Yes. I really enjoyed comedies. I liked theatre in Nigeria, I liked that the stories had a moral. I was always writing, when I was in secondary school I used to write stories for comics. My brother could draw anything so I would write the stories and he would illustrate them. We used to sell them in our lunch breaks at school.

Tell me about your training.

I never did a playwriting course at university because I thought the lecturer was quite boring, I wasn’t the only one. A lot of his lectures would have about five people in them. I thought “I’ll be damned if I sit in a class with him” so I did American Theatre and guess who ended up teaching the class? There was no getting away from him. But he had a passion for American Theatre, a passion I had never seen. I thought “He’s not bad” and I started to get into theatre. I did an MA in Literature and I took a creative writing module within it, that was the first structured writing class I had ever done in my life. Even then I was still more looking towards fiction and poetry. It was the course tutor who read one of my stories and he said “You said your background is in theatre right?” I said “Yes” He said “It’s funny because your narrative is like dialogue, go back to theatre, I’m sure you’ll be very successful ” I said “No, I want to write a book, I want to see it on a shelf”  He said “Just give it a try”. They were doing a creative writing prize for poetry, fiction and playwriting. I wrote a piece for the playwriting section and I won it. I thought “Maybe he is telling the truth”. So I tried my hand at playwriting. When I finished my MA I went on to do a PHD in African Drama and that gave me the impetus. I was reading all these plays by African playwrights.

And how did Early Morning come about?

A friend of mine showed me a flyer from Birmingham Rep Theatre, it was asking for plays by writers who had never had anything produced. It was a new writers’ programme. I wrote one act and sent it off to them. When it was time to start the course they wrote back to me and said that I was too old for the programme but that they liked the play. They wanted me to send it to them when I had finished it but I didn’t see the point if I wasn’t eligible for their programme so I left it and went back to my studies. A year later I got an email from them asking if I’d finished the play. I thought “Oh my god” and so in a week I added about ninety pages to it and sent it off. They wrote back to me and said they really liked it and they would help me find a London venue to develop and produce it. It eventually went on at Oval House in 2003.

When you saw your play on for the first time how did you feel?

It was great because I had sent it to all the venues and they all turned it down. In the end a young director said to me “It’s the subject matter, no theatre is going to put it on”. It’s a political satire about two Nigerian cleaners in a London office who decide they are going to overthrow Tony Blair.

Why did theatres turn it down?

The reason why theatres didn’t like it was because they couldn’t tell whose side I was on. That’s what satire is all about, it’s not meant to make you feel comfortable. In a sense satires are comedy where you laugh at people’s foolishness, you don’t laugh with them you laugh at them. What I wanted to do was turn it on its head so that you laugh at them but all of a sudden you realise, what they said isn’t actually funny. So it was a tragedy masquerading as a comedy.

At that time a lot of theatres were looking for black writers because all the funding coming in was for theatre to put on black and Asian writing. So to have access to money they had to be putting on diverse work and they wanted it to be nice, they wanted all the black characters to be put in a nice light. Here was me writing a play about Nigerians as they really are, there was no sugar coating. They weren’t used to that. It took three years and in the end we applied to the Arts Council.

What was the reaction of the audience?

I was so excited on the first day of opening night, I was on cloud nine and the young director said “You look happy” I said “Yeah” She said “It seems you don’t know what you’ve written” I said “Yeah I know what I’ve written” She said “Are you sure because you don’t look worried to me” People worry too much, they don’t trust people’s intelligence, they think people will be outraged at something honest. I just said to her “People are going to see it for what it is” And they did, they loved it, they were laughing their heads off. It was on for three weeks and the play sold out in the last two weeks because of word of mouth. The people who turned it down came, and you could see them watching the audience’s reaction.

What made you persist and go against the rejection?

Stubborness. A fair amount of stupidity. I had gone to workshops, watched a lot of plays, read a lot of plays and I just felt that I knew what I was doing. I had seen Nigerian plays and I thought What was being shown were not authentic, of course this is subjective. I just felt that Nigerian plays would spend the first half an hour explaining the culture and I just wanted to dive into the story. I started seeing more Caribbean plays because they weren’t explaining what Patwa words meant they just told the story. I didn’t see plays use Nigerian words and if they did it was to get a few cheap laughs. People would say I needed to write my plays so that people would understand and I thought “It’s not my problem” no one was going to tell me how to write plays about where I come from. We had to do it ourselves in the end but it took off. Obviously there was an audience for that kind of stuff.

Are there playwrights’ work that you are enjoying at the moment?

Loads. I saw Arinze Kenye’s play Little Baby Jesus (Oval House) and I also saw Fixer by Lydia Adetunji (Oval House). I love the work by Roy Williams, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Debbie Tucker Green, because they tell the story the way they want to. They tell stories about the society in which they live. I saw Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors at The National Theatre and it was the funnies comedy I’ve ever seen.

What is your writing process?

If I have a commission I just write the first draft to get it written. I get everything out, everything on my mind and then I start chipping away. I look at what works and what doesn’t. I’m currently writing a play and it took me four years to write the first draft. I thought I did a good job at first but when I read it just before going to a literary meeting I thought “Oh my God this is crap, this is horrible” So I went into the meeting and they were very polite about it. When you are fairly established they won’t tell you to your face. And I was like “maybe it’s not that bad” I started defending it. I’m like “yeah, yeah it’s alright” I got back home, I read it again and I was like “Oh it’s worse than I thought!”” So I took one scene that was seventeen pages long and I deleted everything else. I spent a whole year rewriting it. It was a comedy at first, it’s now a tragedy, the main character was a female, it’s now a male, there were five locations and now it’s one. The process is very important. Writers have to be aware of the process that works for them. Now I usually tell theatres that my first draft is really bad. I did a project last year and told the theatre this and they said “oh come on, you're just being modest ” and then after they read the first draft  I met them and I could see how panicked they were. They were thinking “Why did we commission this guy? He’s rubbish!” But of course they were too polite to say, they were like “Em...errr” So I said “I did tell you my first draft was really bad” and they said “We thought you were joking!” They said that to me (Laughs) I said “Don’t worry I’ll get there” And in the end they were so happy.

Do you like to be in rehearsals?

I love the process, I love to be in rehearsals. I love to meet the actors. Sometimes I get shocked by the choice of actors because it’s not what I envisioned and I say “what is going on?” and the director says “trust me” and so I do. The actors perform and they’re amazing and I’m glad the director didn’t listen to me! It’s important for a writer to trust the director, they know their job.

What type of music do you like?

I like Fela Kuti. Fela was on at The National and Sadlers Wells. I saw it in Nigeria.  You should listen to his music, he created a whole genre of music, Afro Beat, although he would call it African Classical music. It’s amazing. He’s also my creative inspiration, he merged music with politics in a way I had never heard. He died in 1997 but the music lives on.

What do you do for fun?

I like travelling. If I don’t travel out of the country once a year I feel like I’m going mad.

Where do you like to travel to?

Any where someone will pay! If you tell me you’re sending me to a war zone I will be at the airport because you’re paying.