Small island people: black British women playwrights

Abstract

I've been puzzled by the fact that young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchised, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as if they own the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything, are centred, in place: without much material support, it’s true, but nevertheless they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. Stuart Hall, 'Minimal Selves,' 1987 Historians of post-war British theatre have typically taken as their starting-point the pivotal 1956, the year of the Suez Canal fiasco, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the formation of the British New Left, and the first performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger . Black performers had been a presence on radio and television as early as the 1930s, but 1956 was likewise a critical moment for the emergence of a distinct black British theatre; it was in this year that John Elliott’s television docu-drama about Caribbean immigrants, A Man from the Sun , was performed on BBC, that Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl , and, critically, that Pearl and Edric Connor established the Edric Connor Agency to represent black artists in theatre, radio, and television. During the next thirty years, largely ignored by the rapidly expanding fringe movement and its sponsors and critics, black artists in the theatre sought to reflect the lives and aspirations of post-colonial immigrant communities whose populations in Britain had increased dramatically in the aftermath of the war and the dissolution of the British empire. The years from 1956 through to 1963 witnessed a burgeoning of work for black actors, especially on the stage, and the performance of a series of plays by black writers, including Errol John, Wole Soyinka, and Barry Reckord. A number of amateur drama clubs such as the West Indian Students' Drama Group channelled the talents of younger artists.