Book Review - A welcome addition to Jamaican theatre

• Title: '3 Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology (1977-1987)'
  
• Editor: Honor Ford-Smith
  
• Publisher: Paul Issa Publications
  
• Reviewed by: Michael Reckord

Jamaicans began writing plays in a focused way in the 1940s and in every decade since then there have been more plays written than in the previous one.

Because many of those plays were also produced in the eighties and early nineties, more than 20 new plays were staged commercially. In addition, many more new plays were mounted in various amateur festivals and competitions - those organised for the Secondary Schools' Drama Festival and the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC), for example.

That's a lot of plays.

But perhaps because, as some sociologists claim, Jamaica is an oral and not a literary society, very few of those plays have been published. So the recent publication of '3 Jamaican Plays' by businessman and accomplished theatre practitioner Paul Issa is to be joyously welcomed.

The three plays are Masqueraders, by Stafford Ashani, first produced in 1977 at the then Cultural Training Centre (now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts); Whiplash, by Ginger Knight, first produced in 1983 at the Theatre Inside, Green Gables; and Fallen Angel & The Devil Concubine, by Patricia Cumper, Honor Ford-Smith, Carol Lawes, Hertencer Lindsay and Eugene Williams, first produced in 1987 in the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre at the School of Drama.

Masqueraders is a complex, meandering work, featuring a group of actors who, while discussing personal and societal transformation through art, actually stage dramatic scenes. The characters, with names like Hawk, Hopey, Mad Dog and Pitchy Patchy are clearly, from the outset, players within a play. Later, another level of play-acting is introduced, and they play still other characters - on stage and with the audience often interacting.

The production can get the audience quite confused, which the playwright knows. That's why he advises, through Hawk: "Just go with the flow of the show. It will solve itself."

On the other hand, Whiplash is quite straightforward. It is about the division, leading to enmity, between two inner-city brothers caused by party politics in the 1970s. Miss Inez, the mother of Alton and Dennis, struggles in vain to raise her sons in respectability; but the pull of the gun and politics - the youths belong to two different parties - is too powerful. Tragedy is inevitable, the playwright seems to be saying, given the pressures on the poor in the inner city.

Fallen Angel & The Devil Concubine is a two-hander about the quarrels that two old women, Katie, who is white, and Lettie, who is black, have as they battle for control of a derelict colonial mansion. They attempt to dominate each other by lying about themselves and trying to discover the other's secrets.

The process of the play's creation is interesting. It began with the two actresses who would go on to play the roles in the first production improvising with the objects in an old suitcase. The two, Lawes and Ford-Smith, worked with Williams and Lindsay, then later the fifth author, Cumper, made a playscript out of the improvisations.

Ford-Smith not only helped create the final work, but she edited the plays and wrote four insightful introductions to the book. The 'General Introduction' places the plays, and Jamaican theatre generally, in a colonial and post-colonial context. Politics, art, spirituality, class, colour, gender, economics and struggles against - and the succumbing to - imperialism are discussed.

Later, Ford-Smith - a former lecturer at the School of Drama, the founder of Sistren Theatre Collective and now an associate professor at York University, Toronto - gives individual introductions to each of the plays. They do more than merely assist in the reader's understanding of the works: they make one want to see the plays performed.