IF YOU ASK ME how many times I’ve been in the Daphne Joseph-Hackett Theatre since it reopened in August 2017 and been blown away by a Trinidadian play in that hallowed space, the answer would be twice.
The first time was by chance while during Carifesta XIII. I’d skipped out of Grand Market and hopped a ZR to town to hang out at Frank Collymore Hall awhile. I took in an eyeful of edgy Cuban dance before skipping out again and into nearby Queen’s Park to see what was going on there. In truth, I was searching for an old friend I had not seen in ages. She looked fabulous. I could see she’d had some work done!
Daphne Joseph-Hackett Theatre was one of my second homes when I covered the arts back in the 1980s and 90s. I often felt saddened in the time since to see her doors boarded, Queen’s Park House itself with the gallery on the ground floor under various stages of ruin, the both spaces closed. But that cool August night it felt comforting to find a seat five minutes before curtain and fall into a next world turning on stage. The Trini play in question: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Calypso and Coups, about an estranged couple who unexpectedly reunite when the twin-island state shuts down during a coup. In that darkened, intimate, familiar space, with hard truths being played out by the two-person Trini cast, I felt like I had been transported back in time. And I had.
My second visit, a weekend in January, was no different. That is where I caught Duelling Voices by Trinidadian playwright Zeno Obi Constance, staged this time by a Barbadian company—Varia Williams’ Mustardseed Productions, with its Youth Theatre Ensemble directed by Luci Hammans.
The play, written in 1984, deals with the unlawful relationship between a married schoolteacher and his underage pupil. Or, to cut through the bullshit, as did the guidance counselor who was part of the panel after the Sunday night performance: it is a play about sexual predation and rape.
Like NourbeSe Philip, Constance possesses a wily knack for placing his people in difficult situations and abandoning them, it almost seems, to wriggle their own way out of a maze. In Duelling Voices, this maze is presented cleverly, as a scenario within a game that is being played; voices, ideas and realities are exchanged in often blurred-line confrontation.
Kudos to Varia for staging such a challenging and controversial play.
Also to the small, mostly, if not entirely, teenaged cast, which demonstrated Barbados has some proper talent lined up for future stage and screen. Each actor performed a dual role (often a student character and an adult character, an antagonist and a protagonist), highlighting further the duelling suggested by the play’s title and the duality of human nature. Very often, the switch from one character type to another was made in a drumbeat—literally and figuratively, since music, rhythm and movement were also key to the production. Dialogue was real, raw, hilarious, and punchily delivered. It was impressive to witness. A packed and at times raucous hall on the Sunday night performance I attended bore testimony to this.
Kudos also to Ocean Campbell as Eric, the errant teacher. Mustardseed’s was a tight ensemble production, but this gifted young actor did major lifting to deliver a leading and (almost disturbingly) convincing performance. A crucial scene for me, too, was an emotionally charged one in which the schoolgirl in question, Marge (Abayomi Harper), is confronted by her best friend Keisha (Skyye Lambert).
Kudos to the director for eliciting such performances.
And to the technical crew (and cast) for working seamless magic with a minimalist classroom set, including creative use of electronic blackboard as backdrop. This blackboard was used to, among other things, provoke and throw questions at us. What would you do? What are you going to do?
For now, I am asking questions of my own.
The situation presented by Constance was relevant long before he wrote Duelling Voices nearly 35 years ago and still is today. One wonders what the play achieved in Trinidad and other places it has been staged over the decades. What lessons, what impact, what changes? How has the play been applied?
This could be useful data for Barbadian guidance counselors, many of whom were reported to have ducked from the invitation to see the play. How did they pass up the opportunity to add such a weapon to their arsenals, a tool to their kits? The mind boggles! This is a play that needs to be seen by the whole of Barbados.
I can imagine the obstacles to it being staged or toured nationally for an extended run: the time needed, and that cast members, indeed any such youth ensemble, would themselves be in school. Then there are venue and financing issues. But could it also be that relationships between teachers and students are so commonplace, so crowding our doorstep, that to drag out the very audience that needs to see such a play might result in revelations and fallout of Harvey Weinstein proportions?
In the discussion afterwards, there were references to the play’s timeliness given the climate of #MeToo and #LifeinLeggings.
It is the #TimesUp movement that catches my imagination, though (that notion of calling time on the status quo is, for me, easier to apply to all forms of abuse and injustice, not just sexual). If we are entering a new, post-Weinstein age of new thinking and behaviours, it’s going to be a difficult transition. Painful. Messy. Duelling Voices is one for the arsenal, toolbox and medicine chest.
In the meantime, I’m hoping, asking, that this amazing Barbadian cast and crew reassembles at least one more time and the production is filmed—for that difficult-to-reach audience.
I look forward to visit No.3 to the renewed Daphne Joseph-Hahckett Theatre, wondering what maze—Trini, Bajan or otherwise—my old friend will have in store for me then. Linda M. Deane
