Vaulting Ambition Jamaica’s Barn Theatre 1966 -2005

by Brewster, Yvonne

• ISBN13: 9781845233600
• ISBN10: 1845233603
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-01-01
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

Summary

For more almost forty years, Jamaica’s Barn Theatre was a crucial part of the development of a Caribbean theatre that extended beyond the Europhile elite. When it began in 1965, there were scarcely any plays written by Caribbean playwrights to perform. By its presence The Barn encouraged the work of dramatists such as Dennis Scott, Ashani Harrison and Carmen Tipling, and above all the work of Trevor Rhone, with whom Yvonne Brewster enjoyed a close if sometimes tumultuous theatrical relationship. Yvonne Brewster's splendid retelling of the making of the Barn captures the phenomenon of youthful ambition, creative optimism and rollicking intellectual excitement that characterized the spirit of young people fired with the zeal of imagining a postcolonial self as distinct from a colonized self.

Author Biography

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne Brewster went to the UK to study drama in the mid-1950s at the Rose Bruford College - where she was the UK's first Black woman drama student - and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she received a distinction in Drama and Mime, and was a pupil of Marcel Marceau. She returned to Jamaica to teach Drama and in 1965 she also jointly founded (with Trevor Rhone) The Barn in Kingston, Jamaica's first professional theatre company. Upon her return to England she worked extensively in radio, television, and directing for Stage Productions. She has worked on many films, among them The Harder They Come, Smile Orange and The Marijuana Affair, and for BBC TV The Fight Against Slavery and My Father Sun Sun Johnson.