All My Sons to headline 2019 Jos Theatre Festival

The 12th Jos Festival of Theatre will open in Jos, Plateau State on May 7.

Since the festival had its debut, it has become a nurturing ground for Nigerian artistes, as well as a platform for them to showcase their talents.

The 2019 festival with the theme, Building a New Generation for the Arts, will feature riveting plays and a variety of workshops for the artistic community. The classes in acting, dance, and arts management will hold during the day with theatrical performances in the evenings.

The Jos Festival’s plays will present poignant messages concerning honour, family discord, politics, and the abuse of power. The workshops will include facilitators from Jos, Lagos and Abuja.

The 2019 edition will also showcase the directing skills of two female directors — Olajumoke Olatubosun and Kalbang Afsa-Walshak.

Among the plays that will feature this year are, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and Sefi Atta’s Death Road, which will have its world premiere at the festival. The French contribution to the festival is Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson, a comic-tragedy on a Professor who lures students into his studio and kills them with the assistance of his maid.

Local actors under the direction of Olajumoke Olatubosun are performing The Lesson in English. Kalbang Afsa-Walshak is directing Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Patrick-Jude Oteh is directing Sefi Atta’s Death Road while Sunny Adahson will direct Jerry Alagbaoso’s Tony Wants To Marry.

Jos Repertory Theatre (JRT), organisers of the festival, will be reviving Zulu Sofola’s classic, Wedlock of the Gods under the Theatre Master’s programme. Sefi Atta’s Death Road is a classic tale about recruitment and radicalisation within a once peaceful household whose livelihood is threatened from within by the first son of the family.

The festival receives ongoing support from the U.S. Mission Nigeria in addition to an array of local and international supporters such as Plateau State Ministry of Information, Grand Cereals Limited, the International Performer’s Aid Trust (IPAT), and the Jos Business School.

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which will headline the festival is set in World War II when a manufacturer of military hardware short changes the military by producing defective military parts for war planes with the attendant consequences of loss of lives of young fighter pilots. A man is wrongly jailed for this crime while the perpetrator of the crime goes freethinking that he was freed because he was ‘smart’. His family discovers the scam decades later and in his old age, his sins come to haunt him. It is a classic play about war, honour, pride and retribution. It is a true story about an actual event during World War II.