LAOLU OGUNNIYI (Playwright)

"Sir Laolu Ogunniyi? You mention his name and what immediately comes to mind are his plays with their unforgettable, haunting, lingering threnodic music and ambience..." - multi award-winning writer, Chief O Bolaji

Some celebrated plays by Laolu Ogunniyi

Fateful Eclipse
Onibonoje Press
1975
87 pages

Riders on the Storm
Onibonoje Press
1975
71 pages

Candle in the Wind
Onibonoje Press
1977
75 pages

Better Days
Macmillan, Yaba Lagos
1982
73 pages

“The playwright, Laolu Ogunniyi is one of the fabled, rather early dramatists from Nigeria. His plays were broadcast on tv since many years ago, which added a cachet of celebrity to the highly talented wordsmith. His superb plays included Fateful Eclipse, Winds against my soul, and Candle in the wind. The latter play is a typical Ogunniyi drama, with plenty of pathos and tragedy, attempts to dissect societal problems, general sparkling eloquence, and ebullient intellectual discussions. Ogunniyi at the time was young, earnest, passionate, and quite brilliant as this play elicits. (When his plays were put on the screen, the riveting sound effects and music always accentuated the melancholy ambience). Like in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters, the dramatis personae in this work try to thrash out explicatory dimensions amidst pertinent dilemma(s) of the society. Here we have young love, passionate, moving, but doomed. The title hints at the sombre unravelings...candle in the wind: precarious, vulnerable, fleeting and ephemeral. Trenchantly Doomed. And so is the love alluded to in this work. The brilliant male protagonist appears to be larger than life in his effusions and eloquence...and when ultimate tragedy strikes in the end, even a heart of stone would shudder...” – a contemporary review of “Candle in the Wind”