Over the many years and decades in Guyana, theatre and theatrical performances have been therapeutic for most people.
People have gone to the Theatre Guild, national cultural centre, and other entertainment people when they need a good laugh, and as we say in Guyana, to relieve their stress.
A true legend and champion of the local stage, Marc Matthews, who contributed to much of that entertainment, received a lifetime award from the Theatre Guildfor his work as a poet and storyteller at age 86.

During the ceremony, Marc Matthews related to the audience how he began his career in the late 1960s and has worked with several legends, including Ken Corsbie, among others.
According to one member of the Board of Directors of the Guild, veteran actor and broadcaster Ron Robinson, Matthews began his career as a scriptwriter working for the then Guyana Broadcasting Service and as a tutor in drama at the Cyril Potter Training College
He has also been involved with the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (CAM). In 1987, Matthews won the Guyana Prize for Literature.
His earnest quest and passion for theatre became reinvigorated after he came back to Guyana in 1969 by simply finding out what theatre is and what people want.
He also noted some things that inspired his performance, particularly street theatre. He recalled growing up as a Pastor’s child, he shared what his experience was like
“I was referred to as Pat Matthews’ ‘dougla’ son, and then Pat Matthews’ ‘mad son’,” Matthews told the audience, who then rolled up into laughter.
One of his relatives disclosed that her uncle moved to London in 2000 and would often invite her to see him perform in London’s Caribbean theatre scene, where he was and remains… a legend!
According to his Wikipedia page and the bio read at the event, Marc Matthews was born in British Guiana in the 1940s. He received, he reports, “a mid-Victorian education” at Queen’s College, Georgetown.

“He worked as an operator, producer and presenter on Radio Demerara, as a scriptwriter and documentary researcher/ presenter for Guyana Broadcasting Service, and as a tutor in drama at the Cyril Potter Teachers Training College. He was a co-director/founder of Jaiai Independent Broadcasting Unit, and with Peter Kempadoo produced Our Kind Of Folk for radio in Guyana.
In the 1960s Marc Matthews was in London as a freelance reporter, involved with the UK Black Power movement and alternative theatre productions. He was closely involved with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), being, along with Linton Kwesi Johnson, one of the most prominent younger poets to come out of CAM in the 1970s. Unlike with Johnson, Matthews’s pioneering role as a nation language performance poet has not been fully recognised, perhaps because his roots and material were always more Guyanese than Black British.
Similarly, because of its nature as live theatre rather than as published scripts, his important work, first with fellow Guyanese Ken Corsbie in Dem Two in 1974, then in 1975 in All Ah We, which added John Agard and Henry Muttoo, has largely vanished from the record, if not the memory of those who witnessed them. Only Matthews’s record Marc-Up (1987) survives as a record of those days.

As the tyranny of the Burnham years worsened, Matthews settled in the United Kingdom. However, he made one attempt to return to live in Guyana after the return of democratic government in the 1990s. In 1987, he won the Guyana Prize[5] for his first collection of poetry, Guyana My Altar (Karnak House, 1987). (Kairi in Trinidad had produced an early unbound pamphlet by Matthews, Eleven O’clock Goods, in 1974.) His collection A Season of Sometimes was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1992. His work has also been anthologized in collections such as The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English.
Around 2005 Matthews, working under the pseudonym “Tramping Man”, formed a musical collaboration named Burn Brothers with two London-based producers, Jean Philippe Altier, and Adam Hoyle. They were joined by saxophonist Florian Brand and performed a number of gigs in and around London in 2007. A record entitled Fire Exit was recorded and released in April 2008.”