Writing Bandele's writing encompassed
fiction,
theatre,
journalism, television, film and radio. His plays include:
Rain;
Marching for Fausa (1993);
Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994);
Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival;
Death Catches the Hunter and
Me and the Boys (published together in one volume, 1995); and
Oroonoko, an adaptation for the RSC of
Aphra Behn's 17th-century
novel of the same name. In 1997, Bandele did a successful dramatisation of
Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel
Things Fall Apart. and was published in one volume with his play
Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999. He also adapted
Lorca's play
Yerma in 2001. resident dramatist with the
Royal National Theatre Studio (1996), the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at
Churchill College,
University of Cambridge, in 2000–01. He also acted as
Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the
Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003. Bandele wrote of the impact on him of
John Osborne's play
Look Back in Anger (1956), which he saw on a hire-purchase television set in a railway town in northern Nigeria: , 2010 Bandele's novels, which include
The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991) and
The Street (1999), have been described as "rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit as well as political engagement". His 2007 novel,
Burma Boy, reviewed in
The Independent by Tony Gould, was called "a fine achievement" and lauded for providing a voice for previously unheard Africans. At the time of his death, Bandele had been working on a new novel, entitled
Yorùbá Boy Running, which had been due to be published in 2023, and was subsequently rescheduled for July 2024. The novel, which includes an Introduction by
Wole Soyinka, was partly inspired by the life of Bándélé's great-grandfather, who had been formerly enslaved, like the novel's protagonist,
Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Helon Habila, reviewing
Yorùbá Boy Running in
The Guardian (London), writes: "The fictional Crowther's story, as well as the real-life one, is a remarkable saga of perseverance, dedication and triumph over adversity. ... What Bándélé brings to this well-known story is his ability slowly and painstakingly to build his protagonist’s character, not just as the public figure known to every schoolchild in Nigeria – the first black man to be ordained a bishop by the Anglican Church of England, the first African to earn a degree from the University of Oxford – but also as a father, a son, a husband and a citizen. ...The editors have done a great job of ordering and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are lucky and grateful that the author was able to leave us with this bookend to his glorious if truncated career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he started running towards a distinguished future in faraway London."
Filmmaking Bandele's 2013 directorial debut film,
Half of a Yellow Sun – based on the 2006
novel of the same name by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – was screened in the Special Presentation section at the
2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and received a "rapturous reception". The film received a wide range of critical attention. Writing in
The Guardian,
Chibundu Onuzo described it as "a subtle movie of a large war, intimate and revealing of the personal tragedies that took place from July 1967 to January 1970....It is important that Bandele's film has been made." He also directed the third season of the popular
MTV drama series,
Shuga, which aired in 2013. His 2015 film, entitled
Fifty, was included in the
London Film Festival. In 2022, he directed the first
Netflix Nigerian Original series
Blood Sisters. Characterised by
Variety as a "passion project" for the director, ''Elesin Oba, The King's Horseman'' was "the first-ever Yoruba-language film to premiere at TIFF in the Special Presentation category, and then onto Netflix". ==Other work==