Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama (review)

It is truly a pleasure to review this book, because it covers not only the theatrical career of Derek Walcott to 1993, but also the outlines of anglophone Caribbean theater from the late 1940s to the 1990s. From 1974 to 1990, I was myself heavily involved in Barbadian theater as a director, both on and off the university campus, and as a theater reviewer, and kept up with what was going on in theater all over the Caribbean.

There has been far too little scholarship on theater in the Caribbean, and much of the story is fugitive, stored in old newspapers and reviews, videotapes, the memories of participants, program notes and the like, and subject to loss or misplacement, though the Walcott papers at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad are a rich source of material now that King uses extensively.

This is an important resource book and, I can testify, from my own close knowledge of most of the period of which he writes, largely accurate. Its major weakness is also its strength: the laborious paraphrasing of review after review of each production; the listing of cast names, small budget items; the retelling of stories of personal conflict and affiliation, including a repetitious account of Walcott’s early relationship with a woman who became his third wife, Norline Metivier. Any scholar new to this field finds in these details an extremely helpful guide to where to begin. For the critical reader, however, King’s evident desire to rely on collating views of those he interviewed, and only one in a while expressing a guiding argument of his own, becomes irritating. Sometimes, his details are wrong (inevitably there are mistakes even in the finest scholarship, so a few tiny errors should not be seen as vitiating the general quality of King’s work). For example, Michael Gilkes is not “an Indian from Guyana” (339) but of multiethnic heritage. The production of Dream on Monkey Mountain (1980) is attributed to “the University of the West Indies” in Barbados. It was indeed done by a campus group of students, directed by a visiting Theatre-in-Education specialist, Roger Chamberlain. Chamberlain found he had a predominantly female group of actors at audition so made a very practical and at the same time visionary move by casting the main male parts as women.

King also has a tendency to repeat material, and at times collates two pieces of information that do not seem to be connected. Once in a while, after keeping himself a largely distanced narrator, he bounds into the middle of the tale, as when pouring scorn on some New York theater critics: “And God forbid!, that anyone should write plays in verse with images and symbols and a non-linear narrative” (165). But the fact is that in general you will get quite dramatically different responses to theatrical performance even among experienced theater critics: King gives in at times to a desire to beat up on American theater, often using complaints he heard from those of Walcott’s actors who tried to break into the American theater world without major success. Now and then, he makes a most interesting remark, but he rarely develops such insightful side comments, as when he points out that less than enthusiastic response of some Barbadians to the 1968 production of Dream on Monkey Mountain might have been precisely because this was a more middle-class, intellectual audience than responded to the play intuitively in St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent. The question of whom Walcott writes for, whom he most reaches, as evidenced by his quite diverse portfolio of plays and their productions, is very important, in terms of Walcott’s contribution to creating Caribbean cultural priorities and identities in the late twentieth century.

King does illuminate some familiar aspects of Walcott’s aesthetic and personal persona by contextualizing them in reference to the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Walcott’s creation, support, stimulation, and at times frustration and arena for occasional dramatic displays of self...