‘Just an ordinary lawyer’ showing today in Lagos

The play, ‘Just an ordinary lawyer’ will have its last show today, Thursday September 7th, 2017 at the Muson Centre, Lagos.

The play, which highlights the legal profession/professionals, is dedicated to the abiding memory of Bankole Olumide Aluko, a maverick legal mind, and written by his brother Tayo Aluko, an Engineer-novelist. The Nigerian Bar Association Section on Business Law (NBA-SBL) in support of this great work and in honour of Bankole’s memory will today lead a contingent of lawyers to see the play at 7:00pm.

‘Just and Ordinary Lawyer’ tells us of Tunji Sowande, who left Nigeria to study law in Britain and who in 1968 became the first black head of a major barrister’s chambers. Although more diffuse than its predecessor, it is a fascinating show that interweaves politics, music and Sowande’s abiding passion, cricket.

Tayo Aluko seizes on the fact that 1968 was a turning point in Sowande’s legal career to bring together the themes that animate the show. We are reminded of that year’s internal conflicts in Africa that were part of the imperialist legacy, of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and of the black power salute by two African-American athletes at the Mexico City Olympics. While deeply aware of all this, Sowande was at the Oval watching Basil D’Oliveira score 158 against the Australians – an event that had political repercussions, as it led to the eventual cancellation of an England tour to South Africa because of D’Oliveira’s Cape Coloured origins.

Nigerian-born Tayo Aluko, a Writer, Performer, Producer, is based in Liverpool, UK, where he worked until early 2009 as an architect and property developer, with a special interest in eco-friendly construction.

With his one-man play CALL MR. ROBESON, he won the coveted Fringe Review Outstanding Theatre Award at the Brighton Festival Fringe in June 2016. He also won the Best Actor, Best Original Work and Impresario awards at the London Fringe in Ontario, Canada in Summer 2012; the Best Solo Show at the Stratford Fringe in June 2013 and the award for Best Musical Performance at the Atlantic Fringe in Halifax, Nova Scotia in September 2013. He sold out all his eighteen performances at the New Zealand and Adelaide Fringes in 2015. The play has also been performed on a number of occasions in Nigeria and Jamaica, to great acclaim, and also at New York’s Carnegie Hall in February 2012.

Tayo researched, wrote and narrated to camera a film on the history of West Africa before the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, which forms part of the permanent exhibit at the National Museum Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. With The Maltings Theatre, Berwick-upon-Tweed, he developed a new piece titled WHAT HAPPENS? featuring the writings of African American Langston Hughes (with songs from the era), performed to live jazz accompaniment. In October 2013 he produced the inaugural Paul Robeson Art Is A Weapon Festival in Covent Garden, London, which featured speakers and performers from as far afield as South Africa and Canada.

As writer-on- attachment with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse theatres, he developed this new play titled, JUST AN ORDINARY LAWYER, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2016, and features as a mainstage production at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in August 2017.