Morolake Adesina
Futurist Story Architect | Award-Winning Director | Immersive Producer
Some creatives tell stories. Others are interested in what happens after the story has been toldthe conversation it starts, the assumptions it unsettles and the possibilities it leaves behind. Morolake Adesina is increasingly positioning herself among the latter.
A London-based writer, director, producer and founder of Scene-opsis Productions, Adesina is building a multidisciplinary practice spanning theatre and film, with storytelling rooted in identity, culture, relationships and contemporary social experience. Drawing on her Nigerian heritage and her experience of multicultural Britain, her work moves confidently between theatre, spoken word, rap, music and screen to explore stories that do not always fit neatly into conventional creative boxes.
Her journey began as a performer, including a lead role in Osamede at the MUSON Centre in Lagos, before evolving into writing, directing and producing her own work. Her debut UK stage production, You Can't Find Love in London, attracted more than 250 audience members during its first two-night run at The Cockpit Theatre and returns to the venue on 9 and 10 December 2026.
Her work on screen is also gaining international attention. In June 2026, Adesina received Best Female Director at the Tokyo Film and Screenplay Awards for The Cladder, adding to festival recognition for films including Perfecto and Mask-uline. Her forthcoming one-woman play, Happily, Ever After, takes her socially engaged storytelling further, using theatre to open a wider conversation around domestic abuse, cultural expectations and resilience.
With a Master's degree in Film with Practice from the University of Kent, Adesina is now moving beyond a collection of individual creative projects towards something more ambitious, building original intellectual property, developing Scene-opsis Productions and establishing a body of work capable of travelling across cultures, audiences and platforms.
That makes this an interesting moment to meet her. The question is no longer simply what Morolake will create next, but what kind of creative voice, company and cultural legacy she is beginning to build.
We put seven questions to Morolake to discover more.
All information and links were correct at the date of original publication on
26 Aug 2026
What is the story only Morolake can tell?
I think what is becoming unmistakably mine is the way I look at human beings: with a great deal of observation, empathy and, perhaps, an almost stubborn sense of idealism.
I grew up absorbing people and environments very deeply. Even today, I can identify parts of my personality and tell you where I learnt them, who I observed them from, the period of my life in which I absorbed them, and how those encounters have continued to shape me. I have always been fascinated by why people become who they are — what we carry, what we conceal, the choices we make, the compromises we justify, and the experiences that quietly shape our behaviour.
That instinct inevitably finds its way into my work.
When I create a character, I don't approach them from a distance. I try to live inside their emotional reality before I put them on the page. I ask myself what they are afraid of, what they desperately want, what they would never admit aloud, and what has happened to them before we meet them. Sometimes that process becomes intensely emotional.
I have found myself crying while writing scenes because, by that point, the character's experience no longer feels theoretical to me. I shed a tear while working on the adaptation of Happily, Ever After, and again while developing the emotional trajectory of one of its scenes.
Interestingly, that instinct existed in me as an actor before I fully understood how central it would become to my writing and directing. I once re-enacted a scene involving postpartum depression, despite never having been pregnant or experienced postpartum depression myself. Meg Otanwa, the award-winning actress whose original performance I had reinterpreted, saw it and described my rendition as the most truthful she had seen. That stayed with me because "truth" is precisely what I am searching for. I may not have lived every experience I write about, but I want to understand its humanity deeply enough to honour it.
At the same time, there is another side to my storytelling that I think is equally important: I am an idealist.
I am deeply aware of how chaotic, contradictory and sometimes cruel the world can be, but I don't believe storytelling must surrender to cynicism simply because cynicism can appear more sophisticated. There is still something almost childlike in the way I imagine what the world could look like if we were more courageous, more compassionate and more truthful with one another.
Freiya in You Can't Find Love in Londonis a good example. Someone once described her as "naive" and "dreamy" and “putting pressure on things”. But Freiya simply wants love in its most sincere for. without games, manipulation or emotional dishonesty. I found that fascinating because it raises a larger question: when did wanting something genuine become naive? Perhaps the world has taught us to regard sincerity as unrealistic. My work often challenges that assumption.
That same idealism does not mean my characters are morally perfect. Quite the opposite. The Cladder, for instance, confronts guilt, conscience and the consequences of compromise. At its heart is something recognizably human: the moment when we know something is wrong but speaking up may cost us something. Most people may never face the precise circumstances of that story, but almost all of us understand the smaller compromises, the moment we stayed silent, looked away, chose convenience, or later wished we had acted differently.
That is the human mirror I am interested in holding up.
Across The Cladder, You Can't Find Love in London, Happily, Ever After and the work I am continuing to develop, I think my creative signature is becoming a combination of truth, idealism and human reflection. I want to examine people as they are, flawed, complicated, frightened, hopeful, while still daring to imagine who we could become.
If audiences eventually recognize something as a Morolake Adesina story before they see my name, I hope it is because they have encountered something deeply human: a story that makes them recognize themselves, question themselves, feel something they did not expect to feel — and perhaps leave imagining that we are capable of being a little better than we have been.
What Have You Had To Unlearn To Become The Creative Leader You Are Becoming?
One of the biggest things I have had to unlearn is my relationship with rejection.
As a performer, rejection can feel incredibly personal because you experience the outcome without necessarily having access to the thinking behind it. You audition, you give something of yourself, and sometimes all you receive in return is a "no". Moving to the other side of the room as a writer, director and producer has completely changed my understanding of that process.
When you are responsible for the overall vision, you realize how many considerations sit behind a creative decision. Someone can be extraordinarily talented and still not be right for a particular character, production or moment.
Sometimes the decision has very little to do with the person's ability at all. Understanding that has made me much more resilient about rejection, but it has also made me more compassionate when I am the person who has to make difficult creative decisions.
I have also had to unlearn impatience.
As a performer, your primary responsibility is usually your own contribution. As a director or producer, you become a carrier of the entire vision, and carrying a vision means carrying people too. I have had to learn that leadership is not simply having the clearest idea in the room or knowing where you want everyone to arrive. It is developing the patience, communication and emotional intelligence to help different people arrive there with you.
My background outside the arts has helped enormously with that. Working professionally with people and understanding human behaviour taught me skills that I did not initially realise would become so valuable in a rehearsal room or on a production: listening, managing different personalities, resolving conflict, communicating expectations and recognising that people respond differently to pressure. Creative leadership has strengthened those instincts further. I am learning to lead by example rather than simply by instruction.
Risk, interestingly, is something I have had to unlearn and relearn.
I have always been a risk-taker. Moving from a legal background into film and theatre was itself a significant risk, although internally it never felt entirely irrational because I had always known that storytelling was where I would eventually find myself.
For years, I would have advised anyone making a major decision to take only calculated risks. I still believe preparation, logic, discipline and hard work are indispensable. But being on this side of the creative industry has taught me something else: sometimes the calculation will never completely add up.
The arts are unpredictable because life itself is unpredictable. You can do the research, build the strategy, work incredibly hard and still reach a point where there is no guarantee waiting for you. At that point, I think you need what I jokingly call an enormous amount of delusion and optimism. For me, that is ultimately faith — the ability to believe in something before there is enough external evidence to justify believing in it.
Some things cannot be explained on a spreadsheet.
I have also had to unlearn what I thought a successful creative career was supposed to look like. Growing up, we largely see the flashing lights: the premieres, awards, applause, interviews and finished productions. We rarely see the years underneath them.
Now I see the ground work. I see the countless unnoticed hours. I see the drafts nobody reads, the applications that receive no response, the productions that begin as conversations, the mistakes, financial sacrifices, difficult decisions, rejections and moments when you have to keep working without any external validation that what you are building will succeed.
Being around accomplished creatives and learning from people further ahead of me has made that even clearer. Success is rarely one extraordinary moment. It is often an accumulation of very ordinary days in which somebody simply kept going.
And perhaps the most liberating thing I have had to unlearn is the idea that someone else must give me permission.
There is enormous value in mentorship, collaboration, institutions and having people who believe in your work — I have benefited from all of those things and I value them deeply. But there is a difference between seeking guidance and seeking permission to exist.
At some point, I realized that I did not need to wait for someone to call me a writer before I wrote, a director before I directed, or a producer before I produced. I needed to do the work, become better at the work, build the right teams around the work and accept responsibility for what I put into the world.
That has changed how much space I am prepared to occupy.
I no longer think occupying space means taking it away from somebody else. The sky is large enough for all of us to fly. Someone else's success is not evidence that there is less room for mine.
So I am becoming increasingly comfortable with dreaming expansively, not arrogantly, but unapologetically. If my mind can see what Scene-opsis Productions and my work could eventually become, then I am willing to do the years of work required to discover how far that vision can travel.
I don't need permission to fly. I need courage, discipline, faith and humility to keep learning how.
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Does Crossing Cultures Give a Storyteller Greater Freedom Or Greater Responsibility?
I think it gives you both, extraordinary freedom and enormous responsibility.
The freedom comes from recognizing just how vast the human experience is. The world is filled with cultures, histories, languages, traditions, belief systems and ways of living that no storyteller could exhaust in a lifetime. For someone who is naturally curious about people, that feels like being given a bottomless reservoir of stories.
My own life has allowed me to experience that intersection quite personally. My creative foundations were formed in Nigeria, and I am now developing my work within Britain while increasingly seeing that work encounter audiences and institutions internationally. Moving between those worlds has made me conscious of both cultural difference and the extraordinary similarities underneath it.
But that freedom comes with responsibility.
If I am entering somebody else's cultural world as a storyteller, I believe I have a responsibility to approach it with respect, curiosity and humility. Research cannot simply be about finding enough information to make a story look authentic. It has to be about understanding the people behind the details.
That is something I am particularly conscious of with Happily, Ever After. The play centres the experience of a Punjabi woman and engages with family, culture, marriage, domestic abuse and the expectations that can surround them. Because I am writing beyond my own immediate cultural experience, a considerable amount of research and consultation is going into the work. I want the details to feel truthful, but I am equally conscious that no individual character should be made to carry the burden of representing an entire culture.
That distinction matters to me. Cultural specificity should create humanity, not stereotypes.
At the same time, I don't believe culturally specific work has to constantly stop and explain itself.
Art is one of our great universal languages. Audiences around the world have cried watching Korean dramas without speaking Korean. People have fallen in love with Bollywood films without ever having visited India. African stories travel to audiences who have never stepped onto the continent. We encounter characters whose customs, languages and realities may be completely different from ours, and somehow we still understand heartbreak, longing, fear, betrayal, humour, guilt, love and hope.
That is the extraordinary thing about storytelling.
Sometimes an audience does not need to understand everything. If they can feel something, the story has already crossed a border.
Of course, I still work very deliberately to make the emotional architecture of my stories accessible. You Can't Find Love in London, for instance, deliberately brings different cultures, nationalities and perspectives into the same theatrical world. London itself makes that possible. What interests me is not erasing those differences so that everyone becomes easily digestible, but finding the human questions underneath them.
I think there is an important difference between making a story accessible and making it comfortable.
I care deeply about accessibility. I want audiences to enter my work. I want them to understand enough to travel with my characters. But I don't think I have a responsibility to remove complexity, soften an uncomfortable truth or translate every cultural reference simply because somebody in the audience may not immediately recognise it.
Sometimes not knowing is part of encountering another person's world.
That is particularly important when we talk about Black, African and multicultural stories. I don't think those experiences should have to become culturally neutral before they can be considered universal. The specificity is often precisely where the beauty is.
So my priority is the integrity of the work: Is it truthful? Have I done the research? Have I listened? Have I resisted easy stereotypes? Have I treated the people whose experiences inform the story with dignity?
If I can answer those questions confidently, then I have to trust the audience.
My responsibility as a storyteller is to build the most truthful bridge I can. I don't need everyone who crosses it to come from the same place, speak the same language or understand every detail along the way.
I just need them to arrive at something human.
What Does It Take To Turn An Idea Into Something People Will Actually Pay To Experience?
There is a saying I grew up hearing in Nigeria's film industry, Nollywood: it takes a village to make a film.
I had some understanding of what that meant from watching other people create and from the theatre work I was involved in while studying law for my bachelor's degree. But there is a considerable difference between observing the process and becoming the person ultimately responsible for making it happen. I gained a completely different perspective when I finally, as I like to say, "wore the pants myself" and dived in.
I quickly discovered that creativity is only one side of the equation.
Ideas are everywhere. There are probably extraordinary ideas being conceived every second. But an idea alone does not become a production. It takes human capital, financial capital and, in my experience, faith capital to move something from imagination to reality. Then comes an entirely different challenge: convincing an audience that what you have created deserves not only their money, but something equally valuable, their time.
Building productions from the ground up has taught me that one of the most powerful principles in that entire process is surprisingly simple: respect.
As the founder of Scene-opsis Productions, I recognise that I am building a name and a legacy from the ground up. At this stage, every production is doing more than selling tickets; it is building a reputation. Every interaction is establishing what people will eventually understand the Scene-opsis name to represent.
So I am building trust simultaneously with several groups of people: my creative and business collaborators, including Tony Hyland MBE; theatres and other industry partners; the artists and production teams who entrust their talents to my vision; and, perhaps most importantly, the audiences who choose to spend their money and their evening experiencing something we have created.
The relationship we have developed with The Cockpit Theatre illustrates that progression particularly well. The theatre took a chance on You Can't Find Love in London for its first run. That relationship has since progressed to a second run of the production in December 2026 and a completely new Scene-opsis production, Happily, Ever After. For me, that progression is significant because repeat relationships are one of the clearest indications that trust is beginning to form.
And I believe trust begins with respect.
If a theatre feels respected through the quality of your proposal, your preparation, communication, professionalism and the way you conduct your production, you make it easier for them to trust you again. If artists feel that their time and contribution are respected, you create an environment in which they can do their best work.
The same principle applies to audiences.
Before somebody buys a ticket, they are already having an experience with your production. The poster, trailer, photography, website, copy and social media campaign may be their first encounter with your work. That is why I take publicity materials extremely seriously. They are not an afterthought to the art; they are the beginning of the audience relationship.
When someone sees a Scene-opsis production advertised, I want them to feel that thought, care and quality have already gone into what they are being invited to experience. They may still be deciding whether the production is for them, but they should never feel that their attention is being taken for granted.
I learnt another important lesson about that balance between creativity and commerce while casting You Can't Find Love in London.
A friend once advised me, from a perfectly understandable commercial perspective, to cast most or all of the production based on popularity and social influence. The argument was straightforward: recognisable faces could potentially bring audiences with them, help sell out performances and make it easier to recover the investment.
I understood the economics behind the advice.
But that was one of those moments when I realized that the businesswoman and the creative in me had to sit at the same table.
I was launching a production to an audience that largely had no previous relationship with Scene-opsis. If I prioritized popularity over ability and the audience arrived to find that the work itself did not justify the promise of the marketing, I might make a short-term commercial gain while damaging something much more valuable: long-term trust.
So I chose the strongest performers I believed could deliver the work.
That decision taught me something fundamental about the kind of company I want to build. Commercial thinking does not always mean choosing the option that appears capable of generating the fastest return. Sometimes the most commercially intelligent decision is protecting the quality of the product because the production itself is the strongest advertisement for the next production.
That has changed how I think as a founder.
I now think beyond individual ticket sales towards audience development, reputation, relationships and longevity. Someone buying a ticket to You Can't Find Love in London is important. But someone leaving that theatre trusting Scene-opsis enough to become curious about Happily, Ever After, and eventually another production after that — is how a sustainable creative company begins to emerge.
I am still learning the business of creativity, and I think I always will be. Producing independent work has certainly taught me about budgets, casting, venues, marketing, negotiation and commercial judgement. But underneath all of those things, it has taught me something even more fundamental:
Respect builds trust. Trust builds relationships. And strong relationships create the conditions in which creativity can become commercially sustainable.
That is the foundation on which I want to build Scene-opsis Productions.
How Do You Know When A Creative Risk Is Worth Taking?
I wish I could say I have an elaborate formula for determining whether a creative risk is worth taking, but quite often it begins with instinct. I have a very strong gut feeling about things. I can also get slightly high on my own optimism sometimes — perhaps that is the choleric in me! But underneath the instinct, there is something much more important to me personally: I pray about my decisions. When I have a genuine conviction about something, I am usually prepared to move.
I have never been particularly interested in doing something simply because "that is the way it has always been done". Convention is useful when it serves the story, but I don't think convention should become a creative prison.
At the same time, I don't want experimentation simply for the sake of being able to call something innovative. For me, the question is ultimately: does this choice give the story a more interesting or truthful way to exist? If you remove the novelty, is there still a creative reason for doing it?
You Can't Find Love in London is probably the clearest example of me testing that philosophy because, looking back, the production had creative risk written all over it.
First, I decided that my debut UK stage production would be a rap and spoken-word musical.
There was one slight problem: I am neither a rapper nor a singer.
I didn't come from a rap background, nor did I have a ready-made community of rappers and musicians around me waiting to bring this unusual idea to life. What I did have was a very clear sense of how I wanted the story to feel. London is rhythmic. Dating is rhythmic. Arguments have rhythm. Attraction has rhythm. Different cultures and personalities colliding with one another have rhythm. Rap and spoken word gave me a language through which those characters could move rapidly between humour, confrontation, vulnerability and observation.
So I followed the idea.
Then came what was probably the greater risk: I decided to build the musical around electronic music without a live band.
At one point, I remember literally going onto Google and asking whether anyone had ever done something similar. I found very little. That probably should have frightened me.
Instead, it excited me.
There were very practical reasons behind the decision too. Independent theatre requires you to think creatively about resources. The financial and logistical implications of assembling a live band, rehearsals, musicians, scheduling, space and the wider production infrastructure, were significant for a new independent company.
I could have looked at those limitations and concluded that the ambition needed to become smaller.
Instead, I became fascinated by a different question: what if the limitation could become part of the form?
Could electronic music become more than a substitute for a live band? Could it become the sonic architecture of the production itself? Could actors move between dialogue, rap, spoken word and music while a deliberately constructed electronic soundscape carried the rhythm underneath them?
I could hear it in my head before I could prove that it would work.
That is often the point at which creative risk becomes interesting to me.
Constraints do not always have to reduce creativity. Sometimes they force you to invent a language you might never have discovered if you had unlimited resources.
Of course, experimentation only matters if it survives contact with an audience. When You Can't Find Love in London finally opened at The Cockpit Theatre, the audience response gave us the answer. People engaged with the form, laughed, responded vocally and travelled with the characters. More than 250 people attended the two performances, and the production is now returning for a second run in December 2026.
That does not mean every experiment within the production was perfect. In fact, I think one of the responsibilities of being a creative leader is being able to say, "That worked beautifully; that could work better; and that needs to change." A returning production gives me the privilege of interrogating those choices again and refining them.
I think that is also how I distinguish meaningful experimentation from innovation for innovation's sake. I am not loyal to an unusual idea simply because it is unusual. I am loyal to what best serves the story.
My process therefore sits somewhere between instinct, faith, imagination, practicality and evidence. I listen to my gut. I pray. I interrogate the idea. I consider the resources available to me. I surround myself with people who have expertise I don't possess. And eventually, there comes a moment when thinking has to give way to courage.
Because sometimes you cannot know whether an unconventional idea works until somebody is brave, or optimistic, enough to put it on a stage and find out.
What Happens When the Subject You Are Exploring Is Bigger Than the Production Itself?
Happily, Ever After actually gives me an extraordinary sense of déjà vu.
Ten years ago, in 2016, when I was a 19-year-old fourth-year law student at the University of Lagos, I wrote, produced and directed one of my first independent plays. It was a two-person, approximately 45-minute production exploring domestic abuse within a relationship between two university students.
I performed in it alongside my friend and classmate, Williams Hadusa Hosanna, and I remember very deliberately bringing the realities of young people into the writing, the relationship dynamics, the environment we understood, and the ways power and abuse could exist within a relationship that, from the outside, might simply look like two young people in love.
The production was staged as part of a women's empowerment programme called Ladies Day. I still remember standing in that auditorium at the end and hearing the response from an audience of more than 3000 people, including invited public figures. There was a standing ovation.
I was 19.
At the time, I could not possibly have imagined that approximately a decade later I would find myself returning to the subject of domestic abuse through Happily, Ever After, this time as the founder of my own production company, developing the work for a London theatre and seeking to extend the conversation beyond the stage through engagement with voices from safeguarding, social care, advocacy and public life.
There is something quite emotional about that full-circle moment for me.
But the scale may have changed; the fundamental responsibility has not.
When you create work around domestic abuse, safeguarding, tragedy or any experience with genuine consequences in people's lives, artistic freedom cannot mean artistic carelessness. You are still an artist, you need imagination, interpretation and the freedom to create, but integrity has to be written all over the work.
That means research. It means accuracy. It means listening. It means recognizing where your own knowledge ends. And it means remembering that what is dramatic material to a storyteller may be somebody else's lived reality.
I encountered that responsibility very strongly while directing The Cladder, which engages with the Grenfell Tower tragedy alongside wider questions of guilt, conscience, power, responsibility and redemption. When a real tragedy sits anywhere within the landscape of a fictional work, I think the creator has to become even more conscious of the distinction between using tragedy for dramatic effect and creating art that genuinely has something meaningful to say in conversation with it.
I don't personally believe any subject is inherently "too big" for art.
In many cases, art is precisely where the subjects that are too difficult for ordinary conversation find a language.
Theatre can put us inside another person's experience. Film can make something that feels distant suddenly intimate. A character can sometimes communicate the human consequences of an issue in a way that statistics, reports and headlines cannot.
But that power is precisely why responsibility matters.
Creators can influence how audiences understand people they may never personally encounter. A fictional character may become somebody's first meaningful encounter with the experience of domestic abuse, a particular culture, a social injustice or a historical tragedy. We therefore have to ask ourselves not only, "Is this compelling?" but also, "What understanding might somebody leave this work carrying?"
That question has shaped the way I am developing Happily, Ever After.
I don't want the production to behave as though a play can provide the final word on domestic abuse. It cannot. The theatre piece can illuminate an experience, provoke questions and create empathy, but there are safeguarding professionals, advocates and people with lived and professional experience who bring dimensions to the conversation that the production alone cannot provide.
That is why I am developing the project beyond the performance itself, with a post-show conversation intended to bring relevant voices from safeguarding, social care, advocacy, media and public life into dialogue around the issues the play raises.
For me, that is an acknowledgement of something important: sometimes the subject is bigger than the production, and the creator should be humble enough to know that.
The role of the production is not necessarily to contain the entire conversation. Sometimes its role is to open the door.
That is the responsibility I feel as a storyteller. I want the artistic work to remain fearless enough to confront difficult realities, but responsible enough to treat the people behind those realities with dignity.
So whether I am approaching domestic abuse in Happily, Ever After, the moral consequences surrounding The Cladder, or another socially consequential subject in the future, I return to the same principles: respect, research, accuracy, truth and humanity.
If those principles are present, I believe art can enter even the most difficult territory.
And sometimes, rather than making a difficult subject smaller, the most meaningful thing a production can do is give that subject a stage large enough for people to finally talk about it.
Are you building a career or an institution?
I am building a career, certainly. But if I achieve what I have imagined, **my career will ultimately be one chapter in the story of the institution I built.
Scene-opsis Productions has never existed in my mind simply as a vehicle for Morolake Adesina's work.
I remember very clearly being in my tiny room in 2023, during my master's programme, sitting on my bed and drawing up this enormous mental picture of what Scene-opsis could become. At that point, much of what I could see existed only in my imagination. But the vision was remarkably specific.
I could see a company recognized internationally for exceptional original film, television and theatre. I could see intellectual property being created and owned within the company, productions travelling between countries and, where appropriate, between stage and screen. I could see Scene-opsis working across Europe, Africa and Asia, collaborating with both major institutions and ambitious independent producers to bring culturally distinctive and meaningful stories to audiences around the world.
But I could also see something beyond productions.
I could see people.
One of my greatest ambitions is for Scene-opsis to become a genuine talent ecosystem, a place where extraordinary creatives who may not yet have visibility can be discovered, developed, represented and connected with opportunities beyond our own productions.
There is so much talent in the world that remains untapped, not necessarily because people lack ability, but because they lack access, networks, training, representation or simply somebody willing to take that first chance on them.
I know what it means to build without an enormous institutional machine behind you. That experience is shaping the kind of institution I want Scene-opsis to become.
Eventually, I would like other production companies to be able to come to us looking for an actor, writer, director, cinematographer, composer, designer or another creative professional and know that Scene-opsis has developed a trusted pool of exceptional talent. I want us not only to create opportunities within our own productions, but to become a bridge through which talented people access opportunities across the wider creative industries.
Education is another major part of that vision.
I want Scene-opsis to deliver world-class masterclasses across the entire filmmaking and theatre-making process — not simply acting and directing, but writing, producing, cinematography, sound, music, stage management, production management, design, marketing, financing and the business infrastructure that allows creative ideas to become sustainable careers.
And then there is the part of the vision that matters to me perhaps most personally.
I want Scene-opsis eventually to have a substantial charitable and social-impact arm through which people from disadvantaged backgrounds can access high-quality creative training without their financial circumstances determining whether they are allowed to participate.
My long-term vision goes considerably beyond occasional free workshops. I imagine an immersive environment, almost a residential creative academy, where selected participants who would otherwise struggle to access these opportunities could receive training, accommodation, mentorship and the stability to concentrate on developing their craft. For some people, I would want that environment to offer not simply professional training, but structure, community and another possible direction for their lives.
Because talent is distributed far more widely than opportunity.
If Scene-opsis becomes the institution I imagine, I want somebody, somewhere, who currently has extraordinary ability but very little access to be able to point to the company one day and say, “That is where somebody saw what I could become."
Internationally, I also see Scene-opsis functioning as a bridge.
My own creative journey has already crossed Nigeria and Britain, and my work is beginning to encounter audiences and recognition beyond both. That has made me increasingly interested in what happens when creative industries genuinely collaborate across borders — not simply exporting stories from one territory to another, but bringing writers, performers, producers and craftspeople from different cultures into the same creative ecosystem.
I would love to see a Scene-opsis production conceived in London, developed with talent from Lagos, involving collaborators elsewhere in Europe or Asia, and eventually travelling internationally without losing the cultural specificity that made the story compelling in the first place.
And yes, ownership matters enormously.
I want Scene-opsis to build a significant library of original intellectual property. Stories should not necessarily end when the curtain closes or the credits roll. A theatre production may have possibilities on screen. A film may inspire another form. Characters and worlds can travel. The company should have the creative and commercial infrastructure to recognize those possibilities, protect them and develop them responsibly.
That creates employment. It creates intellectual property. It creates international partnerships. It creates opportunities for artists. And, if built correctly, it creates an institution capable of continuing to do those things beyond the career of its founder.
I am very conscious that what I am describing is much larger than the Scene-opsis Productions of today.But I think every institution begins at some point as an idea that looks disproportionately large compared with its current resources.
For me, it began in a tiny room, on a bed, during my master's programme in 2023.
Today, there are productions where there were once only notes. There are audiences where there were once only characters in my imagination. There are collaborators, venues and relationships where there were once only names on a page. That does not mean the institution has arrived. It simply gives me evidence that ideas can acquire structure when you keep working on them.
So yes, I am building my career. I want to become an exceptional writer, director and producer, and there is still an enormous amount I want to learn and achieve as an individual artist.
But Scene-opsis is the bigger dream.If I build it successfully, the greatest evidence of its success will not be how many people know my name. It will be how many stories exist, how many careers were possible, how many people found opportunity, and how many doors remained open because the institution existed.**
That is what I want to leave behind.
What Will It Take to Remain Distinctively Human in an AI-Driven Creative World?
I don't believe AI will take over film and theatre in the way that some people fear it will. I absolutely believe it will transform them. It will change workflows, shorten processes, create new forms of content and probably disrupt some roles quite significantly. It would be naive for any emerging creative not to pay attention to that.
But I think we need to make an important distinction: the tools through which we tell stories can change without changing the fundamental reason human beings seek stories in the first place.
Audiences are drawn to humanity.
They buy a theatre ticket and sit in a darkened room because they want to watch another living, breathing human being become somebody else in front of them. They watch a film and become emotionally attached to a character who may not even exist. They leave cinemas talking about performances. They queue at premieres because seeing the people behind the stories they love means something to them. They follow actors, directors, writers and musicians because, somewhere along the way, the work created a relationship between artist and audience.
Technology can imitate many things. I am less convinced that it can replace our desire for that relationship.We have had animation, visual effects, digital characters and increasingly sophisticated technology for decades, and none of those developments eliminated our fascination with human performers. They expanded the possibilities of storytelling. I think AI should ultimately be challenged to do the same.
So my advice to the next generation of writers, directors and producers would be: pay very close attention to AI, but do not become so fascinated by the tool that you forget the human being on the other side of it.
Learn what the technology can do. Understand how it can support development, production, accessibility, distribution and the business of creativity. Pay attention to emerging platforms and to the fragmentation of audiences. The traditional gatekeepers are no longer the only routes through which work can find an audience, and that creates enormous opportunities for independent creators.But also pay attention to what audiences are becoming hungry for as technology accelerates.
I suspect authenticity will become more valuable, not less.
When audiences are surrounded by increasingly effortless content, the knowledge that somebody wrestled with an idea, lived through an experience, stood on a stage, made a difficult creative decision, or brought something deeply personal to a performance may acquire a different kind of value.
That is what I would resist losing.
I would resist the temptation to allow efficiency to become the highest creative value. Faster does not automatically mean better. Cheaper does not automatically mean more meaningful. Technically impressive does not automatically mean emotionally truthful.
And I would particularly resist allowing technology to make storytellers intellectually or emotionally lazy.If a machine can generate ten ideas for you in seconds, you still need to know which idea deserves your life, your time and your voice. If technology can produce an image, you still need taste. If it can suggest dialogue, you still need to understand how human beings actually speak, conceal, love, manipulate, grieve and contradict themselves. If it can accelerate production, somebody still needs to know what the production is trying to say.That discernment is part of the artist's work.
My own philosophy remains very simple: speak to people's souls.
Let audiences recognize something of themselves in your work. Surprise them. Challenge them. Make them laugh. Make them uncomfortable when the story requires it. Give them characters they are still arguing about on the journey home. And respect the fact that they have invested both money and something they can never recover, their time, in experiencing what you created.
Audiences can sense when something is emotionally hollow, however sophisticated its packaging may be.
So I don't think the challenge for the next generation is to compete with AI by trying to become faster than it. That is probably a race human beings will lose.
The challenge is to become more observant, more curious, more courageous and more deeply human.Use technology. Experiment with it. Understand it. Question it. Establish ethical boundaries around it. Protect intellectual property and the contribution of human creatives as the industry develops. But never confuse the tools of storytelling with the reason we tell stories.
Technology will keep changing.
Human beings will still want to feel seen.
And as long as storytellers remember that, I believe there will always be an audience waiting for genuinely human work.
What advice would you give creatives trying to protect their originality, cultural voice and intellectual property while still embracing innovation?
I would tell creatives to protect two things with equal seriousness: Their voice and their ownership of it.
Protecting your originality begins internally. Remain true to what genuinely interests you and resist allowing doubt, trends or the desire for external validation to gradually edit the most distinctive parts of you out of your work.
There will always be pressure to look at what is succeeding and reproduce it. There is value in understanding the market, but there is a difference between being commercially aware and becoming creatively derivative. Trends change very quickly. Your perspective is much harder to replace.
The same applies to cultural voice. I don't think creatives should feel compelled to dilute the specificity of where they come from in order to make their work internationally relevant. Cultural specificity and universality are not opposites.Sometimes the detail that feels most particular to your world is precisely what makes the work interesting to somebody thousands of miles away.
At the same time, creative confidence must be accompanied by commercial awareness.
My legal background probably influences how strongly I feel about this. Creatives can become so emotionally invested in making the work that we sometimes postpone conversations about who actually owns it. But intellectual property is not an administrative detail surrounding creativity; **for a creative business, intellectual property can become one of its most valuable assets.
Document everything. Understand who owns what before collaboration begins. Put agreements in writing. Read contracts rather than assuming everybody has the same understanding of a conversation. Be particularly clear about copyright, licensing, adaptations, credits, royalties, revenue participation and what happens if a project moves into another medium or territory. And where the stakes justify it, seek appropriate legal advice.
It is far easier to have a slightly uncomfortable conversation about ownership at the beginning of a successful collaboration than a devastating one after the work becomes valuable.
Innovation also introduces new questions. As AI and other technologies become increasingly embedded within creative workflows, creators need to understand what happens to material they put into different systems, what rights they may be granting, and how emerging technologies affect authorship, attribution and exploitation of their work. Innovation should expand your creative possibilities, not quietly separate you from ownership of what you create.
Ultimately, I don't think embracing innovation and protecting originality are contradictory.
Use new tools, but don't outsource your voice. Collaborate widely, but understand your rights. Think globally, but don't dilute the cultural specificity that makes your perspective yours. And create boldly, but build the legal and commercial structures capable of protecting what you create.**
Because having an original idea is powerful. Knowing its value, and ensuring you still have a stake in it when the rest of the world discovers that value — is equally important.