The Twentieth Century

Jamaican Theatre1 impresses for various reasons. The first is the overall attractiveness of this large format, photo-illustrated text that performs a skillful balancing act between “coffee table” picture book and detailed historical record. The range and appropriateness of the photography, and a layout that integrates it as a parallel narrative to the text, make the book an invaluable documentary record. A second reason is thematic range: here “theatre” means the performing arts (theater, dance, and music, as the subtitle indicates) but also extends to include festival arts and cultural performance from Jonkonnu to Carifesta and the Jamaican Festival Movement, from Revivalism to Myal and Kumina in dance theater, and from oral folk culture to radio, television, and film production. While a strictly academic or scholarly study could not reach so far, Jamaican Theatre maintains the attention of the reader not in terms of in-depth analysis (although that is not lacking), but on the basis of compelling straightforward information and documentation. A third attractive feature flows from an authorial style that guides the entire work at the same time that it allows for the incorporation of multiple voices: the foreword by Rex Nettleford (who died in 2010); a 1957 essay by Derek Walcott; an exquisite note by Lorna Goodison on the 1976 Carifesta Gran Gala and the style of its director, Wycliffe Bennett; an essay on set design and execution by Michael Lorde; Yvonne Brewster’s history of the Barn Theatre and testimonial on Bennett; Mary Morgan’s outline of the growth of theater and drama on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies in the 1950s; the history of the Jamaica School of Drama (now part of the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts) provided by Honor Ford-Smith and Eugene Williams; Maria Smith’s chapter on Revivalism and dance; testimonials by Marina Maxwell and Jean Lowrie-Chin on the contributions of Wycliffe Bennett; and Cheryl Ryman’s comments on the Frats Quintet, among others. Each new voice adds nuance to the critical texture of the work.