Like it has done for the past half a dozen years, the festival played host to an array of drama, opera, dance, comedy, and spoken word performances that entertained audiences or, sometimes, left them scratching their heads in dissatisfaction.

There was so much going on at the same time that there were only so many performances, out of dozens, that anyone could settle into.

This year's event, themed, 'Going out of Bounds', featured a carefully selected body of work designed to push the boundaries of performance art.

Wole Oguntokun's Prison Chronicles is undoubtedly one of the festival's great highlights, as it explores the rot of the Nigerian society through the prison system.

The political satire takes a sweeping look at the lives of the downtrodden in the Nigerian space and how power is corrupted to suit the needs of whoever wields it.

It follows the lives of four people of not-so-different backgrounds who have landed in prison for one reason or the other; and their ordeals in the hands of a power-drunk prison warder and his beautiful wife.

The simplest way to describe the play is that it's a theatrical performance of Asa's Jailer hit; the song even features as a comical rendition at some point.

Prison Chronicles' biggest draw is that while it can be intriguing and thought-provoking in spurts, it's also consistently hilarious and never leaves the audience's jaw feeling idle for too long.

The set is also interactive in such a way that the audience is never left out and might as well get acting credits as stage prop.

Perhaps, Prison Chronicles' weakest link might be the fact that it absolves of blame every one of its inmates in one way or the other, leaving little room for important introspection that could have done the play a world of good.

Similarly captivating in a way that's unforgettable is John Ekpeno Ukut's Room 7, a play staged inside the very stuffy Room 7 of Hotel Campbell situated just next to Freedom Park which played host to a great portion of the performances at the Lagos Theatre Festival.

Room 7 is the story of Aishatu, a well-read but also naive first-time traveller to Lagos who has come to the mega city for its famed milk and honey.

Aishatu experiences a tumultuous night at the hotel as she falls prey to opportunistic men who are eager to take advantage of her naivete for their criminal means.

The play's set alone, a sweltering room that can sometimes induce unease, is enough to hold the audience's attention captive, but the small cast still works its socks off to keep the engagement.

Room 7 oscillates between light-hearted, puzzling, and deathly serious in a manner that mostly keeps the audience interested in the fate of its doomed protagonist, and thoroughly earns its applause.

One-character plays can be a bit tricky to pull off, chiefly because it involves a lot of telling and not a lot of showing. With the right mix, a solo performance can be an unforgettable piece of performance art or, if done badly, put your audience to sleep with their eyes wide open.

The audience has to rely on the performer's tremendous ability to make their tales engaging enough to not become a bore after a few minutes.

Tope Tedela is saddled with this responsibility in Whumanizer, a play written by Odenike and Abiodun Kassim.

The Nollywood actor is Tunde Bridges, a Lagos playboy who takes the audience on a journey into his life, family, settling down, paedophilia, and how he navigates his own identity, and patriarchal structures.

Tedela's storytelling kicks off to a great start, and the actor asserts his stage presence in a manner that's hard to ignore.

However, the play's biggest drawback is that it takes on too much at the same time, and struggles to find a strong enough element to make everything a cohesive whole, despite Tedela's sweaty best.

By the time Whumanizer wraps up, it has ebbed, and it comes to a fatigued stop that the audience appears to have been awaiting for some time. 

Bra, another one-character play, struggles to hit similar modest highs as Whumanizer. The play explores the toxic, abusive relationship that a woman struggles to escape.

The metaphorical play explores a topic that is quite common and relatable, which makes it unsurprising that a lot of people in the audience lean so much into it and interact with it to make it more fun than it naturally is.

To its credit, Bra sports a simple yet irresistible set design that develops a life of its own and breathes some fresh life into the play.

Colour Me Pink, a dance drama, is essentially a PSA about breast cancer and the biting need to always do personal checks for early detection.

With an energetic cast of seven working tirelessly for close to an hour, Colour Me Pink presents a plethora of unique stories to press home the same point.

The drama does suffer from getting a little overbearing at some point, the perfect excuse for the audience to develop disinterest halfway into its run time. However, the cast compensates for the monotonous messaging with an energetic performance that's always standing on its toes. 

Colour Me Pink is a pretty decent production that might not get anyone to look forward to a repeat performance, but it has a lot of heart to it.

For all of the art on display at the Lagos Theatre Festival, Benny Akinyemi-Finisher's Operator Gaga offers a unique sense of entertainment because, unlike other productions, it's an audio performance that takes place in an audio theatre.

It is a brief look into the the day of a telephone operator who discovers certain unpleasant truths while on the job, and how her day unravels from that point. The story is nothing groundbreaking, but the voices are pleasant and the vibe is electric.

Operator Gaga might not be the best way to spend 30 minutes, but it's also definitely not the worst use of the listener's time.

That latter distinction would go to The Hidden Fool, a play about Stella, a first-class graduate who can't find a job. The Hidden Fool doesn't aspire to be captivating, or even ambitious enough to do anything that hooks the audience to its presence.

The thankfully short drama leaves you feeling an overwhelming sense of disinterest barely minutes after settling into it. It suffers from the terrible case of being boring.

There are a couple of choreographed dance intermissions (at best described as spontaneous flailing of limbs and generally awkward shaking of bodies), and there are a couple of zingers that get the odd shout from the audience; but the less said about The Hidden Fool, the better, for everyone's sake.

Saving the most unspectacular for last is The Victims, a play about three women who regale the audience with tales of abuse - emotional, physical and sexual - at the hands of men.

While the play works with stories that don't demand too much work to tug at heartstrings, the cast fails, not for lack of effort, to really draw in the audience to these stories.

Even worse, it goes on for what feels like an eternity, begging for someone to put it out of its misery.

And when that end comes, it is with a twist so ridiculous, and so remarkably backward that the play basically cannibalises itself.

The Victims has nothing interesting to add to the conversation on abuse; and worse, it can't make any of its dragged-out narratives interesting enough to care to begin with.

The real victim here is the audience.