The General Manager of the National Theatre, Iganmu, Dr Stella Oyedepo, has been confirmed dead in an autocrash.
According to report, Dr Oyedepo died on her way from Calabar after the Easter break to Lagos.
Dr. Oyedepo is a foremost Nigerian playwright, who was appointed as National Theatre’s GM in April 2018. Oyedepo has written over 300 plays over the course of her career as a playwright with 30 published for the public.
Her first play, ‘Our Wife is Not a Woman,’ was written in 1979 and a large number of her plays were commissioned for specific occasions.
The late Oyedepo was an ex-director of the Kwara State Council for Arts and Culture. In 2001, she wrote ‘Brain Has No Gender’ for the Kwara State Ministry of Education for Women-in-Science Programme.
One of her highly acclaimed plays is ‘The Greatest Gift,’ which contrasts the life of a family destroyed by the father’s drunkenness with the life of a successful family. The play was written and performed in 1988.
In a report by J. Yeseibo, Oyedepo was described as arguably one of the most visible practitioners of theatre in Nigeria with plays that include ‘Survive,’ ‘We Will,’ ‘The Missing Ingredient,’ ‘The Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested ‘and’ Brain has no Gender.’
It was further reported that Oyedepo’s feminism strongly informs her work, which centres around the many ills, perversions, and misplaced social values she perceives in Nigerian society.