– The sixth annual final exam of the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama

By Subraj Singh
There is no doubt that the students who pursue studies at the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama (NSTAD) have one of the most bizarre and most intense final assessments to be found in the country. Sure, many students complain about sitting in a classroom and writing the series of essays which constitute their final exams and they definitely have the right to complain because of everything that comes with sitting an exam – the difficulty, the pressure, the amount of energy required – and although students at the NSTAD do sit such written exams also, the final part of showcasing the skills and training they have acquired at the school comes in the form of a public performance, where they are graded by their lecturers as they complete the last phase of their tenure at the NSTAD before being able to graduate.

This public performance is now a tradition at the Drama School and, as evidenced in the title “Performance 6”, there have been five others of the same performed by the previous batches of students over the years at the NSTAD. The students of the 2015/2016 academic year chose “Retribution” as their subtitle (subtitles are also another tradition the school, e.g. “Performance 5: Rituals”, “Performance 4: Resurrection”, “Performance 2: Pandora’s Box”, etc.) because retribution was one of the major themes that kept recurring in many of the plays that the students were putting on show.
The National Cultural Centre’s auditorium, described by NSTAD’s Director of Studies, Mr. Al Creighton, in his speech as an “examination room” held a solid portion of audience members who turned out to witness the Performance on the 20th August, when it was held. Once the audience members were settled, the show began and the students began to perform the plays, revealing costumes, sets, dialogue, and all the rehearsals that had been worked on for several weeks. The students were clearly focused on not only obtaining the grades they needed, but also on entertaining and educating the audience, as all good theatre is meant to do.
The opening performance was the recitation of an excerpt from Eve Ensler’s iconic feminist masterpiece, The Vagina Monologues, which was performed by four actresses from the NSTAD, and set to the music of Nina Simone. This particular piece came out of the school’s Music class and employed dance, acting, vocal skills and, of course, music. It was a strong performance, due in part to the actresses’ skill, and also because of the relevance of its themes of empowerment, abuse, trafficking and hope, all of which clearly resonated with the Guyanese audience.
The students then moved away from what the Guyanese audience was used to with their presentation of Everyman’s End, a play that was adapted from a piece of Medieval theatre. The play focused on the themes of religion, morality, good and evil and offered the students the opportunity to use several postmodernist techniques in their presentation of the play.

The second half of the program contained three plays that the students created based on several emotions that they had chosen to work with. Sorrow, lust, anger, pathos, envy and joy were some of the emotions that led to the creations of plays. All three of the plays were in realm of theatre known as Realism, basically meaning that these plays can almost serve as snapshots of scenes that can exist in everyday life – with realistic sets, costumes, dialogue, etc. Realistic theatre is very prevalent in Guyana and, perhaps due to the ease of accessibility to the ideas in that form of theatre, the realistic plays, mostly comedic in nature, were thoroughly lapped up by the audience on the night of the Performance.
Monae Matters, written by Yashwantie Rampertab, Ackeeni Bentick and Lakeisha Adams, dealt with prostitution, presenting the very dramatic situation of a mother who enters the world of the streetwalkers in order to provide for her daughter only to find out, through a series of ironic twists, that what she has been trying to salvage has already been long lost. The homey feel of the mother’s initial interactions with her daughter formed a nice contrast with the sultry interactions between the prostitutes on the road and, along with the lewd conversations, dancing and neon-coloured wigs did help to convey the shifting circumstances of the single mother and to express the emotions on which the play was built.

In Deep, written by Uso Telford, was the title of the second play built on emotions that the students of NSTAD presented. Like Monae Matters, this play also focused on recurring tropes that exists in Guyanese realistic theatre – in this case, that of the cheating husband and extramarital affairs. However, the playwright and the team behind this play creatively managed to turn the concept on its head by executing a piece that diverged from the common and attempted to offer instead a new take on a familiar subject.
Life Eh was written by Colleen Humphrey, and although the play was not a perfect one, it was bolstered by some of actors in the cast and one was definitely able to see the potential of the play, which was filled with ideas that could ultimately contribute to a solid play. The obeah-woman who has her own tricks turned back on her, the boy who uncovers a secret that changes his life, and the young girl toying with the affections of a man in order to get money from him were all ripe with the potential for good theatre.

Overall, it seemed as though the current batch of NSTAD students were very focused on comedic and realist theatre, which kind of stands in contrast to the performances of the previous batches of NSTAD students where the more tragic, along with postmodernist, absurdist and Caribbean theatre, came to the forefront. This is in no way problematic since both comedy and realism are both important pillars of theatre, especially in Guyana where they are more popular than any other forms. In this way then, the current batch of NSTAD students have presented the theatre most recognized by the Guyanese people and the type of theatre that is most enjoyed by the Guyanese people. Their performances are just as important as those of their predecessors who sought to present the type of theatre found on the contemporary global stage.