By Barrington Braithwaite

IN last week Sunday Chronicle, Francis Quamina Farrier expressed in his article suggestions for a better National Drama Festival, amid the recent controversy with the 2016 edition that ended with the chief judge, Al Creighton, resigning.
Though my play won with a tie, I did not follow the controversy, so I am unaware of the details. However, I do have enough experience with the theatre to understand that the realm of the stage with its off stage characters lies in the perfect microcosm of politics, that the real sub-plots of theatre do not dwell in the script of the play, but with the pawns the muses use to express and amuse themselves on this plane.

One of the grouses was the pitiful advertising that resulted in the poor turnout. This can only be rectified when the local arts merit encouraging coverage on the local TV news, the radio and the very social media that is used as a complaint and cuss out forum. The fact is that most of the electronic media especially lack the expertise that can hardly recognise if a painting is upside down or not, much less analyse a play. The absence of sensitising can be credited to that overall attitude where the local arts are viewed as a seasonal duty to facilitate rather than a national industry to develop. Again, local media personnel with expertise to even comment vaguely on any creative production is severely lacking, that ability is reserved for a meagre percentage.

Every competition will have real and imagined cries of foul and conspiracy. The essence is to take it to another level. For example, when I self published ‘Shadow of the Jaguar’ in 1988, with a Rastafarian in the lead role, and possibly CARICOM‘s first super hero, a local critic described the comic book as “well packaged trash.”

Then in 1992 when I wrote the stage script for Archie Poole, who produced it for stage with the late renowned Barbadian Director, Earle Warner and Norman Beaton, featured as the Cacique El Dorado the same critic favourably commended it. At that time there were people who presumed that culture and literature in this country were theirs to determine. It even won a best-set design when reviewed by the new theatre arts award group [whose correct name I have to seek out] back then in 1992.

What the authorities of the National Drama Festival should do is open a debate on how much it would cost to produce a play with the elements to hold the TV viewers attention for an hour, followed by a half hour interactive discussion with viewer participation. More possibilities will be opened once it is taken to the next level. Meet the audience where they are, engage them and solicit response. It is quite impossible to reverse to the past audiences of the eighties without special efforts. The NCN since its existence has recorded local shows and there has to be a large archive of material for which a reasonable royalty can be negotiated with its creators to jump start such a project. A young playwright told me that the learning channel carried local plays at some time.

Unless there is a definite new outlook to events like the National Drama Festival that encompasses an annual commitment and concludes with that event, the same can be said for the Calypsonians. Then the impetus will become less motivational for writers, who can write plays but step aside because of the short lived exuberance of the competition’s swift season; which when completed lacks any further steps to insert a relationship with drama into the local consciousness, take into consideration that we’re not a country whose diverse wealth is activated in our interest, as yet, regardless we must persevere, to rectify years of neglect and not just marching to the same redundant drum beat.

The viewing of plays and participation in plays must find a path once more into the winding up of the school year, and with school pageants to celebrate landmark national holidays the options are tremendous, many of us are aware of the precedents that enveloped our upbringing and opened our minds to wider landscapes. It must be recorded that the earliest drama shows to hit old Stabroek was in the 1790’s, when travelling acts from North America visited Stabroek.

According to Henry Bolingbroke’s, ‘A voyage to Demerary’ 1799-1806, that author relates, “Strolling players from north America occasionally visit the West Indies. Twice during my six year stay they came to Stabroek, they chartered a vessel at New York; they had embarked a cargo of canvas palaces and painted forests, of crowns and daggers, sceptres and chains, of the purple attire of majesty, and the motley foppery of folly.” They performed Shakespeare, with Afro actors doing the Moorish parts.

From the plays ‘A Raisin in the sun, Man from La Mancha, Wizard of Oz, Sound of Music, to Rent,’ theatre has made its impact on cinema, with tremendous eternal musical scores. The domestic scene has the ‘minds’ to envisage all that this article presents. What will be demanded is much more balance in plays on references for subject content, in relation to time frames for plots with related period moods unless a deliberate cleaver revolutionary presentation construct is pitched. It’s also time to up our set designs; to create a bond for storage of sets, Mash-art works and stage costumes, with the potential for reuse. Talents like Henry Muttoo are just a significant drop in the Guyanese pool left out of taking us where we need to go. When is it a good time to start expanding, now or…?