It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.
Week 50: Winsome
Pinnock’s A Hero’s Welcome (1989)
I read this play in a collection called Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers edited by Kadija George.
In her introduction and Valerie Small’s short essay on ‘The Importance of Oral
Tradition to Black Theatre’ (marred by some clumsy typos in the titles of a
couple plays), they argue that black theatre is constantly maturing and
experimenting with form and structure, redefining what we mean when we talk
about theatre. Referring particularly to African theatre, Small points out that
dramatic tradition doesn’t always involve a written text and a theatre
building. In this anthology, however, we are offered six texts, ranging from
screenplays to radio plays. Some involve poetry which, when performed on the
radio, become a ‘tapestry of sound’. Some would argue that the issue with
anthologies devoted to female playwrights, as with female poets, is that it
implies that their work is somewhat ‘other’ and perhaps lesser to that of the
implied norm of male playwrights or white playwrights. Nevertheless, an
anthology such as this handily collates and promotes these works.
The play, first performed at the Royal Court Upstairs, is a
story of young love, magic and shattered dreams in the West Indies in the
aftermath of WWII. Wanting to find love, three friends, Minda, Sis and Ishbel
ask the elderly Nana to help them find their true loves. She gives them a spell
in which they have to burn something belonging to the person they want to be
with and whisper some words. Meanwhile Len, who Sis likes, has just returned
home from helping in the war with a limp and heroic tales of surviving gun
battle and seeing friends being shot. These are enough to inspire young Charlie
to pretend he’s a soldier and spend all night decoding enemy signals. On this
stormy island there is a great sense of stasis. Some people are happy to stay
on it such as Sis: ‘It’s my home. I’ll grow old and die right here on this
island, in this district’. Len too, now he’s returned from England, believes
that ‘we got a duty to work, to make something of this world here by
ourselves’. Others, however, want to get off the island with Minda being the
most restless. She yearns to leave the island or to be better off than she was
growing up. Her plan to marry the man whose house she cleans fails when he dies
whilst they’re having sex in the barn behind his wife’s back. She then marries
Len much to Sis’ dismay but soon grows tired of her life with him and Nana.
Eventually, she is drawn by an offer to go to London with someone else,
escaping in the night. For her, England represents a better and wealthier life,
but one can’t help but wonder the realities that Minda and Stanley would face
when they get off the boat. Indeed, Len later confides in Sis that his time in
England (actually working in Liverpool during the war) was met with a piece of
machinery falling on his foot, and racial conflicts.
Rich characters and often poetic dialogue written in a West
Indies dialect makes this play so captivating. There are echoes of Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple, I would
argue, in Pinnock’s use of nature, as well as foreshadowing of Roy Williams’
play The Gift (2000) in its exploration
of the spiritual. Pinnock’s play, though, offers a centralising of a perhaps
often marginalised setting that shows that the monstrosities and effects of
WWII were not exclusive to Europe.
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