Abstract: This interview with Dr Elizabeth Clark, Director of Temba Theatre Company was conducted by Dr Kay Saunders who teaches and publishes in race relations, in London on 5 February 1987.KS: Considering your extensive training at Yale, why did you decide to establish yourself professionally in Britain rather than in USA?EC: Well actually, that came about as a mixture of accident and intention. After I had handed in my thesis to Yale School of Drama I thought that I would pop over to England and see what was happening over here theatrically, before returning to Caribbean where we were supposed to be getting together touring to go off to America. I figured that since training five years in America I knew all of what America had to offer to contemporary drama. England has always been place that has paved new roads, certainly in terms of European drama. Unfortunately, I got caught and stayed much longer than I was supposed to because Equity America then banned us from coming back into America. I knew that I had to establish a part-way base somewhere else than Caribbean for professional reasons, while I got on with developing National Theatre of Barbados.KS: So a lot of your training was directed towards being able to set up a National Theatre in Barbados? You come from Barbados and you've been a lecturer at University of West Indies.EC: Yes, that was while I was doing my thesis which was on Aesthetics of Caribbean Theatre. I'd always known that there was a distinct form of theatre that could be classified as Caribbean theatre but there was no documentation on it. So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and I went to Caribbean and at same time lectured at University of West Indies, not only to get some extra cash but to have access to library. But as a dramatist what I was really concentrating on was drama.KS: I think it would be fair to say that unlike Caribbean novelists -- Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Naipauls, George Lamming, and now Caryl Phillips -- who are very well known to an international audience, Caribbean dramatists don't immediately spring to mind?EC: I knew of people who were writing scripts in Caribbean for years, but they came down in one of two schools. There were giants of Caribbean theatre, as in Derek Walcott that everybody has heard about. Or, there were these people who wrote and then hid their scripts under bed, or in drawers or what have you. Because there is no publishing industry as such in Caribbean. If you are going to publisher you are thinking of publishing a book, but who would think of publishing a Caribbean play? But, you know, there are quite a few Caribbean dramatists I can think of: Augustine Wheatley, and Walcott, and then there is Dennis Scott who is operating out of Jamaica and who is now a lecturer at School of Drama. There is Raoul Gibbons; there is Michael Dukes; there is Errol Hill who was around in 50s, and who was responsible for publishing quite a few plays from Caribbean writers at time. But they came out as kind of chat books. They were published by Extra Mural Department of University of West Indies, and I was very fortunate to find that woman I call the mother of Caribbean drama, Daphne Joseph Hakee, had quite a series of these from years ago, and I picked up at least 15 or 16 other plays of Douglas Archibald, and Edgecorn, from Monserrat. There are quite a few, but problem is either they haven't been published or where they have been published it is on a very small scale, so that they remain in Caribbean. I think that part of my work here in England is to expose Black theatre here to reality of these Black writers who have been there for quite a while but nobody has seen fit to bring them to surface.KS: Well, in Caribbean you've got problem of distance and regionalism, which means that authors simply don't get publicity throughout Caribbean. …
Publication Year: 1987
Publication Date: 1987-05-31
Language: en
Type: article
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