Towards a Caribbean Theatre

Abstract

In 2013, the University Archives, Mona, took over the collection of the Library of the Spoken Word originally housed by the university's Radio Education Unit. The collection dates back to the 1950s. Our Archive Gems feature seeks to showcase some of the gems in this collection.In this issue we present a lecture by Dennis Scott (1939-1991) from the Talks series mounted by the English Department, University of the West Indies, Mona. The lecture was held in the New Arts Lecture Theatre, Mona campus, on Friday 22 February 1980.Scott, in this lecture, presents an imagined-history of the 1980s.there is a promo that starts this. It goes like this: Tonight at 8 o'clock Derek Walcott's play Remembrance will be presented on campus here. We have been asked to end our conversation by ten minutes to eight in order that as many of you as possible may see the play . . . Walcott is, without question, intensely aware of the Caribbean reality, and it is, in addition, a witty piece. I hope you go.I may as well warn you that what follows has no academic respectability whatsoever; it's a discussion of possibilities and a confession of my own hopes. I think I am going to offer this brief paper as a collection of playful insights - an irritant rather than a set of answers. So -A Very Short History of Caribbean Theatre in the Past DecadeIt was not until the end of the seventies, however, 1 that an overview of theatre in the English-speaking Caribbean became both possible and necessary. There were a number of reasons for this. The university campuses which ought long before that to have concerned themselves with the most popular, vital and accessible of the art forms, had early on been seduced by the traditions of academia into the intermittent and entertaining analysis of a few available play texts. Such exercises were satisfactory as far as they went, but they were by their very nature focused on the language and structure of the scripts, whereas increasingly the playwrights had been creating works in which the theatrical images were visual not auditory, and the traditions of performance underlining the texts were local and oral quite as much as they were literary or belonging to the First World. In any case, few texts were available for study, and virtually no actual work existed, critically, to grant credence to the perceptive analysts of the theatre scene, so - and this is a criticism about the theatre - it was very much a halting affair.On the other hand, of course, a number of very important statements had already been made in the sixties and earlier. Walcott's preface What the Twilight Said, attempting to explain his own position, pointed to the creolisation of sensibility, which was one of the persistent themes of the Caribbean experience. Sylvia Wynter Carew had proposed the image of 'a brown girl in the ring' as an ironic description of that process. Marina Maxwell, both as playwright and as commentator, had advocated a rejection of the formal architecture of theatres in favour of a heavily polemic but intimately organised 'yard' theatre. Noel Vaz of the Department of Extra Mural Studies had been a key figure, like Errol Hill, for instance, in stimulating, practically, the creation of a body of Caribbean plays whose content and language were indigenous to the region. But there could be little awareness of a pattern of development, for little that occurred in the various territories was ever documented, and there was a noticeable lack of informed critical concern for the scores of playscripts and productions that surfaced each year.A kind of pattern did, however, exist from the very first, the key element of which was a distinction already current among social historians, between the plot and the plantation. Applied to the theatre, it suggested that the plantation culture of the Caribbean had spawned and posited elements of the 'high' culture, creating an elitist mode of entertainment whose relevance was almost entirely to the educated, metropolitan-oriented audiences of the great house or their descendants, the inhabitants of the dress circle. …