West Indian Drama

Introduction

Since Christopher Columbus’s voyage, the people of the West Indies (or the Caribbean, as the region is now more commonly known) have been sharply divided between the privileged and the dispossessed, the elite and the common, the rich and the poor. (Until 1838, there was also the division between the free and the enslaved.) The development of drama in the West Indies, or the Caribbean, closely follows the region’s historical and cultural development, from its colonial beginnings through the periods of slavery and emancipation to the growing national consciousness in the twentieth century that led to political independence for most English-speaking islands. From the first theater in the region in Jamaica in 1682 until the 1930s, drama in the West Indies largely followed English fashion, serving to maintain the colonizers’ identity with their mother country. The goal of creating an Indigenous West Indian drama—one that addresses the West Indian experience and is created by and for the native West Indian—has determined the direction of theatrical endeavor since the 1930s.

The gradual blending of European and African cultural traditions over nearly five hundred years has produced the modern West Indian Creole languages and cultures. Thus, the question of what is and is not distinctively West Indian in drama is part of the larger issue of cultural heritage. African elements in the folk traditions are strongly dramatic, especially in the carnival and Calypso of Trinidad, the mummers in many smaller islands, and the pantomime and Pocomania in Jamaica. Participants in the carnival masquerade called “The Pierrot,” for example, wear elaborate costumes, usually with headpieces and long trains held by small boys. Each man carries a whip. They set out through the city, and whenever they encounter one another, they exchange long speeches. If one falters in his elaborate oratory, he feels his rival’s lash. The mummers of Nevis and St. Kitts perform in the streets during Christmas and Easter holidays. They recite, play, dance, and mime stories derived from medieval English mumming plays, Arthurian legends, and Renaissance drama. The argument that theater is a European institution and, therefore, alien to the West Indies ignores the significant assimilation of English customs into the culture.

Nevertheless, for the first 250 years of its existence, the West Indian theater was the property of the elite. The colonial theater existed for the privileged plantation owners, governors, and young Englishmen who came searching for wealth and exotic experiences. Actors and plays were English, performed for audiences whose cultural identity still centered on Great Britain rather than the New World. Eighteenth-century New York actors would proudly add to their credits a brief respite in the Jamaican theater—a theater almost wholly British in character and content. The few plays from that period that included West Indian characters or settings used them for exotic appeal or to support the antislavery movement, as in Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (pr. 1771) and the romantic comedy Inkle and Yarico (pr. 1787) by George Colman the Younger. More typical of the dramatic treatment of slave life is Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (pr. 1695), a Restoration tragicomedy based on Aphra Behn’s novel about an African prince kidnapped by an English captain and sold into slavery in Surinam. The prince’s wife becomes the object of the deputy governor’s passion and the subject of a comic underplot.

First Theaters and Formal Plays

Barbados had its first dramatic society in 1729, Antigua in 1788, and St. Lucia in 1832. By the 1820s, Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, supported three theaters and five performing companies. The repertoire was imported, except for a few short plays by Edward Lanza Joseph, who came to Trinidad from Scotland in 1820 and wrote plays and poetry until his death in 1840. He was dubbed “the Bard of Trinidad” because his plays, notably Martial Law (pr. 1832), were set locally and dealt with timely subjects.

Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plays by local playwrights were generally written in the manner of William Shakespeare, with West Indian characters providing comic relief. The Jesuit C. W. Barrand wrote two such five-act plays in blank verse: St. Thomas of Canterbury (pr. 1892) and St. Elizabeth of Hungary (pr. 1890). The epic San Gloria (pr. 1920), by Tom Redcam (the pen name of Thomas H. MacDermott), a play about Columbus, is in a similarly Elizabethan vein, but Redcam’s sympathetic treatment of the Afro-West Indian presents a marked contrast to the usual treatment of Black individuals as lowlife characters speaking comic, pidgin English. The few Black characters appearing in West Indian drama of this period were always played by White actors in blackface. Even when the situation demanded Black characters, they were usually omitted. The 80 percent Black majority of Trinidad had no part, for example, in the first West Indian historical drama, Lewis Osborn Inissrsquo's Carmelita: The Belle of San Jose (pr. 1897). Written for the centenary of England’s takeover of the island from Spain, the play concerns a young English officer who falls in love with the young Spanish beauty Carmelita. Their union symbolizes England’s affectionate husbandry of its colony, yet the Black population whose labor sustained the colony had no part in the historical drama.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw visited Jamaica in 1911 and, in a press interview, told Jamaicans that they ought to nourish their own culture by, among other projects, building a theater and keeping the American and English traveling companies out of it. He said that if the Jamaicans wrote their own plays and did their own acting, the English would soon send their children to Jamaica for culture instead of the other way around.

Early Twentieth Century

As he so often lamented, Shaw went unheard. For the next three decades, wealthy Jamaicans continued to travel to the United States and England to attend plays and maintain cultural connections, and each January, a touring English company would stage plays at very high prices in Kingston.

Nevertheless, given the growing national consciousness of West Indians in the 1930s, Shaw’s advice proved prophetic. The first play about the Black experience in the New World to feature a historical figure of heroic stature was Touissant L’Ouverture (pr. 1936) by the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James. The play was produced in London with Paul Robeson in the title role. Several West Indians who had been studying or working in England at that time returned to the Caribbean with an interest in changing the theater to include working-class people who had largely been excluded from productions (except for Marcus Garvey’s outdoor theater in Jamaica in the early 1930s). Una Marson returned to Jamaica in 1937 to produce her play Pocomania (pr. 1938), the first play to use the African-derived religion named in the title as dramatic material.

The 1940s and 1950s

Later, once again in England, Marson founded the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) program Caribbean Voices (1942), which, along with several new magazines and drama groups, gave strong impetus to a new generation of West Indian playwrights, poets, and novelists. Magazines that published local writers were founded: The Beacon (1931) in Trinidad, Bim (1942) in Barbados, Focus (1943) in Jamaica, and Kyk-over-al (1945) in Guyana. An upsurge of interest in the drama created several groups, including the Little Theatre Movement(1941) in Jamaica, the White Hall Players (1946) in Trinidad, the Georgetown Dramatic Group (1948) in Guyana, and the St. Lucia Arts Guild (1950) in St. Lucia. Committed to developing an Indigenous drama, such groups needed more work from local playwrights. In the 1948 edition of Focus, Edna Manley published Cicely Howland’s Storm Signal and George Campbell’s Play Without Scenery but lamented in the issue’s foreword that the Little Theatre Movement was still in great need of Jamaican plays.

Little more than a decade later, the Trinidadian playwright Errol Hill claimed that there were twenty-seven West Indian dramatists writing at home or abroad, and twenty years later, the Georgetown Public Library published a list of more than one hundred Guyanese plays, many of which had been produced by the Theatre Guild of Guyana, founded in 1957. The University of the West Indies has published its Caribbean Plays Editions from its extramural departments in Jamaica and Trinidad since the 1950s and has made available scores of plays.

The theater groups have done a great deal to encourage both the writing and production of West Indian plays. While strongly identified with the annual pantomime, the Little Theatre Movement of Jamaica has produced work by many West Indian playwrights, notably Errol Hill, Errol John, Barry Reckord, Trevor Rhone, and Dennis Scott. The Theatre Guild of Guyana gave the first Caribbean production of John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (pr. 1957), which won the London Observer’s play competition of 1957 and has been produced in Europe, North and South America, and Australia. The Guild also premiered Evan Jones’s In a Backward Country (pr. 1959) as well as work by many Guyanese playwrights, most notably Frank Pilgrim’s Miriamy (pr. 1962) and Sheik Sadeek’s Porkknockers (pr. 1974).

Derek Walcott and Roderick Walcott

The St. Lucia Arts Guild has the distinction of having produced the two most prolific and important playwrights in the Caribbean, the twin brothers Derek and Roderick Walcott. Both are legendary in the region, with both Derek Walcott winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Though less well-known outside the Caribbean than his brother, Roderick Walcott is highly regarded for his dramatically powerful use of the Creole of St. Lucia, as well as his integration of folk traditions and music in dramatic situations. His best-known plays include The Harrowing of Benjy (pr. 1958), A Flight of Sparrows (pr. 1966), Banjo Man (pr. 1972; performed at Carifesta, Guyana), and Chanson Marianne (pr. 1974), which was commissioned for the Conference of Prime Ministers of the West Indies meeting in St. Lucia in 1974. The commitment of a playwright of Roderick Walcott’s stature to remain in the West Indies gives reason for hope that the exodus of writers that has plagued the region since Claude McKay left Jamaica in 1912 is at least slackening.

is the one West Indian playwright of truly international stature; he is also widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary English-language poets. He has written dozens of plays, nearly two dozen of which are available in print. His accomplishments are legion. The production of his verse play Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (pr. 1950), about the Haitian monarch, is widely regarded as the foundation of an Indigenous West Indian drama. Though the production was staged in London, the cast and crew were West Indian and included many of the region’s leading writers. The Barbadian novelist George Lamming wrote the prologue; Hill, who directed the London production, and John, the lead actor, are both prominent Trinidadian playwrights. When the newly independent Caribbean nations attempted to unite under a federal government, Walcott was commissioned to write a play for the inauguration of the first Federal Parliament. The result was an epic drama, Drums and Colours (pr. 1958), that spans four hundred years of history in episodic scenes framed with interludes of carnival dancers. Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 after studying theater in New York under a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. In 1966, the workshop became the first company to produce a complete theatrical season with West Indian players, and in 1967, it became the first West Indian company to tour internationally. In those successive seasons, the workshop premiered two of Walcott’s most ambitious plays, The Sea at Dauphin (pr. 1950) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (pr. 1967). Caribbean drama history widely acknowledges the impact of the latter, which is regarded as exemplary of Walcott’s dramatic work. In 1972, the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned his musical The Joker of Seville (pr. 1974).

The 1980s saw a further flourishing of Walcott’s dramatic output. He continued to premiere his plays in Trinidad, where his social comedy Beef, No Chicken (pr. 1981) opened at the Little Carib Theatre. The play offers a light treatment of government corruption and public lethargy in a small Caribbean community. Symbolic of the people’s unwillingness to make even small, easy steps toward further economic development, Otto’s Auto-Repair and Authentic Roti Shop, which gives the play its title, is content to offer only beef rotis. Walcott’s next play, The Last Carnival(pr. 1982), premiered in Trinidad in spite of a controversy over the inclusion of some American actors. The play argues that White Creoles are as much a part of the Caribbean’s culture and history as are people of other races. It views decolonization as an outgrowth of British socialist thought. Like many of Walcott’s plays, it has been translated and performed abroad. The Swedish version, Sista karnevalen (pr. 1992), was very successful and contains a few significant changes by the playwright.

On November 25, 1983, Walcott opened A Branch of the Blue Nile(pr. 1983) at Queen’s Park Theatre in Barbados. The play addresses the issues facing professional theater in the Caribbean, with its limited resources and limited indigenous plays. Ostensibly about the staging of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra pr. c. 1606-1607) by a Caribbean troupe modeled after the Trinidad Theatre Workshop portrays the cast’s infighting and philosophical arguments. In addition to an illicit love affair, the play features introspective musings about the merits and dangers of staging a European masterpiece with local talent.

Ironically, A Branch of the Blue Nile was the last drama that Derek Walcott produced in the Caribbean in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Instead, he used England for the premiere of The Odyssey: A Stage Version (pr. 1992). An adaptation of the Homeric epic set in a modern Caribbean world, the play opened to favorable reviews. By 2002, it was Walcott’s only new dramatic play after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded primarily for his poetry. Walcott’s script for Paul Simon’s controversial musical The Capeman (pr. 1998) depicts the story of a Puerto Rican teenager, Salvador Agron, who murders a White teenage couple on a dare from his gang. With the group Parents of Murdered Children protesting its Broadway premiere on January 29, the show folded by March 28, 1998.

Theoretical Debate and International Influence

Although a truly Indigenous West Indian drama began only in the 1930s, the centuries-old folk traditions have readily lent themselves to the creation of unique West Indian theatrical styles. Critical debate in the theater continues, however, over which heritage, the African or the European, best expresses the West Indian experience. Critical judgments continue to be based on the use of European and African elements in the work, such as metropolitan versus Creole English, in dramatic speech. Using the poetic richness of Creole is to limit appeal outside the region, but using metropolitan English in favor of a larger audience is to falsify local character.

C. L. R. James, the foremost scholar of Caribbean literature, died in May 1989, leaving behind a legacy of critical understanding of both Caribbean and world literature. The 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Derek Walcott, further popularizing West Indian drama.

West Indian drama also became more popular and accessible in 1985 with the publication of Caribbean Plays for Playing, edited by Edith Noel, in which new West Indian playwrights were introduced to a more general public, and whose introduction gave the student of West Indian drama some valuable insights into the origins of experimental theater. The book explains the experimental basis of the folk comedies of Ed “Bim” Lewis and Aston “Bam” Wynter in Jamaica, Freddie Kissoon in Trinidad, and Dennis Scott, Rawle Gibbons, Sistren (the all-female Jamaican group that performs documentary theater), and the actors’ theater of Ken Corsbie and Mark Mathews in Guyana. Younger writers such as Kendel Hippolyte of St. Lucia and the commercially oriented works of Trevor Rhone are also mentioned. Other playwrights represented in this important anthology are Zeno Obi Constance and Aldwyn Bully. Less well known is Earl Lovelace, primarily a novelist but also author of several plays, including Jestina’s Calypso (pr. 1976).

Challenges of the 1990s

In Barbados, the competitive drama festivals organized by the island’s National Cultural Foundation continue to foster the emergence of local talent. Anthony Hinkson and Winston Farrell are well-known local playwrights. The career of Glenville Lovell signifies the drain of local talent that has plagued theater in the West Indies. In 1992, Lovell produced his political play dealing with the 1983 intervention by the United States in Grenada, When the Eagle Screams, with a premiere in Trinidad. By the middle of the decade, he had moved to New York to find a larger audience for his dramatic output. Too often, the local stage is considered too small and provincial by ambitious Caribbean professionals who dream of international success in New York or London. Those who remain involved in local productions often hold outside jobs, such as Barbados’s Jeannette Layne-Clark, a playwright of successful satires like Pampalan ’89 (pr. 1989), who also works as a journalist.

Two complementary approaches emerged in Barbados and elsewhere to combat the loss of local professional talent. The first is the Popular Theatre Movement, which seeks to bring theater to local communities and develop short plays dealing with social topics of local relevance. The second is the efforts of professional organizations such as Barbados’s production companies Stage One Theatre Productions and W. W. B. Productions, which seek to produce local plays with local dramatic talent and to tour the Caribbean and the world with its most successful productions.

Within the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a group of loosely allied Caribbean island nations, professional theater remains underdeveloped. Local playwrights and performers quickly desire larger venues for their talents once they rise above the level of amateurs. Therefore, Derek Walcott has not produced his plays in his native St. Lucia for several years. Leon Symester, who took the politically inspired name of Chaka Wacca, left his native Antigua for the United States after writing and producing a series of protest plays in the 1970s. The dramatic theater that has remained is often characterized by modest production values, drawing on those who do not rely exclusively on theater for their livelihood. Characteristic of many other such outfits is Rick James’s Theatre Ensemble on Antigua, which performs brief, locally written plays with modest casts at tourist hotels and resorts on the island. The Popular Theatre Movement seeks to fulfill a social and educational community function and occasionally draws funding from state or international sources. The lack of accessible and affordable performance space has plagued theater companies in Dominica and St. Lucia, for example. Local plays are staged in abandoned schools or hurricane-damaged cinemas in Dominica. Because the government of St. Lucia charges fees out of the range of most producers for the use of its cultural center, playwright-producers such as Kendal Hippolyte have opened small theaters such as his Lighthouse Theatre, which seats slightly more than one hundred spectators.

Trinidad Carnival

By 2000, formal theater had not yet recovered its previous vitality in Trinidad and Tobago. This was largely because of the government’s disastrous 1999 decision to terminate the lease for the Old Fire Station Building, used by the famous Trinidad Theatre Workshop since 1989 as a dramatic venue, effectively derailing the most professionally successful theatrical outlet in Trinidad. The decades of work that Derek Walcott and his collaborators had invested in restoring the building and creating a thriving arts center around this location were lost.

However, the Trinidad Carnival continues to thrive. A dramatic event that is unique in its elaborate quality, Trinidad Carnival has been celebrated annually for more than 220 years and has inspired the best local talent. Key dramatic figures of the Carnival are the Calypsonian, a professional singer whose satirical lyrics often reflect on topical issues, and the masked Revellers, who accompany the Calypsonian with mimed sketches and pantomime performances.

In the 1990s, the Carnival was aesthetically influenced by the costume designs of Peter Minshall, whose work freed the masked Revellers, including the carnival King and Queen and other stock figures, to perform elaborate pantomime routines while still dressed in splendid attire. Minshall’s political and ecological concerns gave the Carnivals of the 1990s a special flair. His costumed bands took on issues such as protection of the environment, global warming, and the specter of nuclear holocaust. In 1992, Minshall and his troupe performed The Arrival of Christopher Columbus (pr. 1992) during the opening acts for the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, using a ship to symbolize Columbus’s arrival to the New World.

The Calypso, sung at the Carnival, emphasizing satirical song and accompanying pantomime, also inspired Caribbean playwrights beyond the Carnival event itself. Rawle Gibbons wrote a cycle of three plays about the Calypso theater experience, Sing de Chorus (pr. 1991), Ah Wanna Fall (pr. 1992), and Ten to One (pr. 1993), further attesting to the cultural impact of this unique dramatic form.

2000 and Beyond

Jamaica, the largest English-speaking island of the Caribbean, offers one of the brightest spots for theater, with a diverse and flourishing dramatic scene. The most popular is the Jamaica pantomime—a combination of music, song, dance, and text focusing on realistic or fantastic subjects. Its audience appeal throughout the island is immense, and its shows at Kingston’s Ward Theatre enjoy long, sell-out runs of many months.

Unique to Jamaica are the plays of “Roots” (short for “Grassroots”) Theatre. These are original, locally written, and produced plays strongly focused on sexual issues. They follow the tradition of Jamaica’s Bim and Bam shows of an earlier age, which also centered on sexual (mis)behavior and the sexual escapades of their comic characters. For example, Jamaican “Roots” theater, as produced by Ralph Holness, can be outright explicit and bawdy. It is a traveling theater form and features a small cast, relatively few props, and scenery and can be performed in almost any venue, ranging from a school hall to a cinema converted for the occasion. While productions for the countryside rely most heavily on sexuality for their audience appeal, the more urbane productions of Ginger Knight and Balfour Anderson strive to add dramatic sophistication to their sexual humor.

Formal theater, based on plays written by Jamaican, Caribbean, or international playwrights, remains popular among urban theatergoers. In Kingston, the Little Theatre, Barn Theatre, and the massive 1,200-seat Ward Theatre are filled with spectators during their seasons. Trevor Rhone, who founded the Barn Theatre with fellow Jamaican producer and actress Yvonne Brewster in 1971, still writes original plays that attract Caribbean-wide attention. Revivals of European and American plays are equally successful.

In Jamaica, government support for the arts and funding of the Jamaica School of Drama at Mona has remained stable, ensuring local talent growth opportunities. Yet even under these favorable circumstances, the migration of exceptional dramatic talent, especially to English stages, has remained an unsolved problem. The situation is much worse elsewhere. In Guyana (formerly British Guiana), the 1990s saw an unfortunate decline of the once-vibrant theatrical scene as economic and political problems caused the departure of most well-known indigenous talent. Playwrights Michael Abbensetts, Jan Carew, and Ian Valz had all left by 1995.

Anywhere lacking official support for local drama, emerging playwrights, actors, or dancers have left their Caribbean countries, where opportunities are difficult to come by. One of the largest challenges for local drama is to develop and maintain a substantial pool of local theater talent so the creative impulses shaped by the Caribbean’s unique multiracial and multicultural environment will not be lost to the stage. The Reichhold Center for the Arts at the University of the Virgin Islands has become an important philanthropic venue dedicated to promoting local talent. Under the directorship of the Montserrat playwright David Edgecombe since 1992, the Reichhold Center has put on an impressive production schedule of Caribbean plays. Founded in 1972, the Carifesta, an artistic festival dedicated to showcasing the best of Caribbean arts and culture, saw its seventh installment in August 1999 in St. Kitts and Nevis. Organized to run every few years at a different location, Carifesta VII featured over a thousand artists from the Caribbean and abroad and produced plays, theatrical workshops, and other artistic activities in an artists’ village built for the occasion.

The future development of Caribbean drama depends on the ability of local playwrights to stay in tune with their original communities. Playwrights should be able to draw further inspiration from topics and concerns from their countries rather than feeling forced to seek artistic fulfillment elsewhere. Once this condition is met, Caribbean theater can experience a new renaissance.

Bibliography

Dewulf, Jeroen. "The Afro-Surinamese" Du" Dance and Song Theatre: A Historical Analysis in a Caribbean Context." Caribbean Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2023, pp. 63-93. https://doi.org/10.1353/crb.2023.a920696.

Hill, Errol. The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Hill, Errol. “Perspectives in Caribbean Theatre: Ritual, Festival, and Drama.” Caribbean Quarterly 46 (September-December, 2000): 1-11.

Innis, Christopher. “Dreams of Violence: Moving Beyond Colonialism in Canadian and Caribbean Drama.” In Theatre Matters, edited by Richard Boon and Jane Plastow. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

King, Barnaby. “The African-Caribbean Identity and the English Stage.” New Theatre Quarterly 16 (May 2000): 131-136.

Lee, Vanessa. Four Caribbean Women Playwrights: Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury and Suzanne Dracius. Springer Nature, 2021.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena, and Bénédicte Ledent. Theatre of the arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean. Vol. 60. BRILL, 2021.

Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Powers, David M. From Plantation to Paradise?: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764-1789. Michigan State University Press, 2014.

Stone, Judy S. J. Studies in West Indian Literature: Theater. London: Macmillan, 1994.