Emergence of Anglophone Caribbean Drama

Abstract

One Hit; One Miss: Theatre ReviewUncle Robert (Ward Theatre). A play by Cicely Howland, produced by Lloyd Reckord. Set by Gil Pratley. Wutherlng Heights. Emily Bronte's novel, adapted for the stage by John Davison. Produced by Tony Lopez.Lloyd Reckord's current production at the Ward of Cicely Howland's Family Poem [Uncle Robert] is excellent. The play itself is subtle, depending as it does on of silence or what the author has called, in her note, moments of solitude.The germ of the play lies in the stylized conception of the third act, when Robert's body lies in the coffin. At these of inexpressible grief, the Chorus, now narrowed down to a suave, numb interlocutor, speaks for the characters. Here the achievement is truly poetic, sensitively sustained. It is spoiled only by a deficiency of language, particularly for the Chorus. There are frequent invocations to stars, mountains, etc., which do not elevate the tension.It is in the portraits of the family that the writing excels. The dots and dashes, tiie silences, the unheard moan of separation that is part of human tragedy, is well conveyed in the portrait of the Grandmother (finely played by Peggy Carley) and, achieving grandeur, of the servant-mother (exactly done by Inez Hilbert).The story deals with the conflicts in an average Jamaican family, headed by a matriarch who, behind her aggressive surface, has a particular love for her unsettled, problematical son, Robert, who is a writer. The other figures in the family are Henry, a stolid Civil-Service type, jealous of his brother, and Henry's children, Babs and Matthew. Next door is a lonely, frustrated woman, Sylvia, who loves Robert but is perhaps more bent on the idea of marriage. Lancelot, a reformed jailbird and son of the servant of the house, is Robert's friend, and when Robert goes into the hills, the family structure disintegrates into boredom.One night Lancelot and his friend are preparing to rob the house when Robert, returning home after a fete, surprises them. In the fight, he is stabbed by Lancelot's friend and dies. The last act is a formal requiem, spoken by the various members of the family.The success of the production is due to the harmony of scenic design, the sinking of every performer (except perhaps Ronald Harrison, who has not fully understood his role as Henry) in the characters to be played, and a uniformity of acting style for which the producer must be given credit.Reckord himself, as actor, has not done enough with the part. Both his youth and his own personality show through the role of Robert. He has hurried about the stage too much to convey energy, and even when he sits still, in his own of public solitude, he conveys more irritableness than an electrified smouldering.At several points in the play, the ease and exactness of some of the performers got them short volleys of applause, including a maturely played Sylvia by Mona Chin, and Keith Binns' gardener-boy.Had the character of Uncle Robert not been sentimentalized by the author when she has him dreaming of flight to the mountains, and the creating of his 'epic poem', and had the play only said something a little more firmly about some error in our human condition, it might have become the domestic tragedy Howland intended. She puts herself at a disadvantage, however, by invoking the ghosts of Homer and the Greeks, and what she has given us is very much less than that. These two points, not of pretentiousness but of inadequacy, lessen the play.A great poet, and we presume Robert is or wants to be one, does not go up into the mountains to write an epic poem. He sits down at a desk in what Yeats calls this sedentary trade'4 and turns out his daily quota. Every time one of the characters mentioned the fact that Robert had to go into the hills to write his epic, I confess to feeling very much like his brother Henry.Out of a competent cast, all of whom use their moments, I should like to single out Hugh Morrison's intelligent but sometimes inaudible Chorus, Noelle Hill's pedal-pusher adolescent, Easton Lee's Matthew most of the time, and Gil Pratley's economical but just-right Mielziner-style set. …