Jos Theatre Festival Reopens With Four Plays, Global Cultural Collaboration
Jos Festival Returns to the Stage
THE Jos International Festival of Theatre will return to the stage on Wednesday 7 October 2026, with the world premiere of Osasogie Efe Guobadia’s Woven Veil.
The 17th edition will run until Saturday 10 October, at the premises of Alliance Française in Jos, Plateau State. It will bring together four plays, theatre practitioners, students, diplomats, policymakers, politicians, teachers and other lovers of the performing arts.
This year’s festival also carries an international dimension. The Embassy of Spain in Nigeria and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, AECID, are collaborating with the organisers to stage the programme.
Four Plays, Four Social Questions
Guobadia’s Woven Veil will open the festival with a story that examines faith beyond the public image of religious devotion.
The play explores the private struggles that unfold inside families of men and women deeply involved in religious life. Behind the pulpit and away from congregational scrutiny, these characters confront ambition, family responsibilities and the consequences of pursuing promises that may come at the expense of domestic peace.
As the story unfolds, the passage of time becomes equally significant. Children grow up while parents pursue dreams and commitments that gradually distance them from their families.
Consequently, Woven Veil presents faith not merely as a public institution but as a deeply personal experience shaped by human weaknesses, choices and family consequences.
Death Levels Every Social Divide
Denja Abdullahi’s Chants in a Cemetery takes the audience in a different direction.
The play confronts mortality and the limits of wealth, status, politics and religion. Its central idea is stark: death ultimately strips away many of the distinctions people construct during their lifetime.
Two gravediggers, an elderly man and his young apprentice, navigate their existence among burial plots. Yet the cemetery makes social distinctions increasingly meaningless because the dead ultimately occupy the same measure of earth.
The play’s absurdist and surreal elements deepen that philosophical inquiry. Even the older gravedigger eventually dies while waiting for his apprentice, reinforcing the play’s meditation on mortality and the unpredictable nature of life.
The work, which has received recognition and an ANA nomination, therefore turns the cemetery into a stage for examining the human condition.
A Widow Challenges Tradition
Jerry Alagbaoso’s A Widow’s Choice brings the festival closer to questions of tradition, widowhood and personal freedom.
The play centres on a woman who loses her husband while caring for their two children. Tradition expects her to marry her late husband’s brother. However, another relative of the deceased also seeks her hand.
Neither option reflects what she wants.
Instead, the widow wants to concentrate on raising her children and creating a stable future for them. Her dilemma consequently becomes a broader confrontation between inherited expectations and an individual woman’s right to determine her own life.
Alagbaoso, who previously presented Tony Wants to Marry at the 12th edition of the festival in 2019, uses humour and imagery to examine the pressures surrounding the widow.
Eventually, her determination persuades the competing suitors to allow her to chart her own course.
Lorca Closes the Festival
The festival will close on Saturday with Federico García Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife.
The play explores an unconventional marriage between a 53-year-old shoemaker and an 18-year-old woman. Their union quickly becomes the subject of village gossip, while tensions inside the marriage further complicate their relationship.
Eventually, the shoemaker leaves his young wife. She responds by opening an inn and attempting to build a life independently, even as the village and its influential figures place additional pressure on her.
The husband later returns in disguise to test his wife’s loyalty. She passes the test, paving the way for their reunion.
Yet Lorca does not offer a simple romantic resolution. Even after reconciliation, the couple return to their quarrels, suggesting that human relationships remain complicated despite moments of forgiveness and reunion.
Theatre as a Meeting Point
The 2026 festival carries significance beyond its programme of plays.
Its original May 5–10 dates were cancelled following the Palm Sunday killings around Angwan Rukuba junction, subsequent reprisal violence and the curfew imposed in Jos North Local Government Area.
Those developments disrupted rehearsals, meetings and preparations for the festival.
Its return therefore comes amid a gradual restoration of calm and public activity in the city. The organisers see the theatre as a communal space where people with different social and political backgrounds can meet through culture.
In that sense, the festival seeks to emphasise shared humanity rather than division.
Nigeria-Spain Partnership Expands Cultural Reach
The collaboration with the Spanish Embassy and AECID also gives the festival a wider cultural dimension.
Through Lorca’s work and the participation of Spanish cultural partners, the programme creates a bridge between Nigerian theatre and Spain’s literary and theatrical heritage.
At the same time, the inclusion of Nigerian plays ensures that local experiences remain at the heart of the festival.
With private and corporate sponsors also supporting the programme, organisers say they intend to make the festival bigger in subsequent editions.
For Jos, the return of the theatre festival is therefore both an artistic event and a statement about the ability of culture to rebuild communal spaces after periods of disruption.
