There are no bears in Nigeria, or at least it seemed so from the opening moments of the Yoruba reworking of The Winter's Tale (Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn) by the Renegade Theatre Company of Lagos. In the opening sequences of this particular production it became abundantly clear to members of the very full audience that watched the evening show on London's Bankside on Friday 25 May 2012 that a number of keynotes of conventional British theatre interpretations of this late Shakespeare play would be joyously set aside and quite deliberately turned on their head. Renegade Theatre is, as a company, all about turning norms upside down. They have continued to stage live theatre in Lagos, chief city in the south-western region of the country, where Yoruba is the dominant ethnic identity, at a time when the form has been under threat from state-level neglect and the competing attractions of television soap-operas and Nigeria's own version of the film industry, ‘Nollywood’. There are very few purpose-built theatre spaces in Nigeria, and in Lagos the national theatre, constructed by the 1970s military regime in the suggestive if disconcerting shape of a military cap, today lies privatized and largely unused. The company has, then, a strongly recuperative ethos in its live performances (frequently staged at weekends) to make theatre take on new meaning for Nigerian audiences. Part of that recuperative ethos can be registered in the willingness of the cast of Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn – many of whom are notable celebrities in the world of television and film in their home country – to be challenged by the act of participation in traditional theatre performance and specifically in the culturally loaded space of the Globe performance of Shakespeare translated into a formal version of the Yoruba language that none of them deploys on a daily basis.