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Transcript of an interview with
Errol Hill
LOCATION: Bridgetown, Barbados
DATE: 1989
Yes, I believe what I was saying was
that my consciousness of both the Carnival, in all its aspects and my
involvement in theatre took place side by side.
Actually, that's not quite true
because I've been involved in theatre practically in my mother's womb. She was
a very well-known actress for the Methodist Church and I think that she was
over eighteen when she still performed some of the church plays, but when I was
seriously involved in the drama through the White Hall players which was one of
the strong amateur groups in Trinidad - this would have been in the 1940s - it
was about the time that I was also very much involved in Carnival and
especially in the growth of the steelband and I did this through the Trinidad
and Tobago Youth Council.
Very few people know and appreciate
what The Youth Council did in those days, but just to give you an example: I
remember along with two other members of the Council - Lennox Pierre and
Carlisle Kerr taking Ellie Mannett into the radio broadcasting unit on Maraval
road - we had a Voice of Youth Programme - and actually being the first people
to put pan on the airwaves, asking Ellie to come and play and explain what the
pan was doing. It was an educational programme and a cultural programme. So you
see, we were very much involved. We wrote poems. My earliest play, Ping Pong was written in 1954, again in an attempt
to let the people understand what was
in the minds and hearts of these steelband players; how passionately devoted
they were to creating music. I don't know if you could remember, but that was a
time when everyday in the newspapers, you would read of fights between the
bands, people being arresting, magistrates saying they're going to send them up
for so many years and actually people being killed. There was one particular
sonnet I wrote about the death of a young man who was stabbed and ran and his
blood forming a trail through Woodford Square. So it was something that we felt
quite deeply and at the same time we were doing dramas.
Many of the plays were being taken
from England - modern English plays, excerpts from Shakespeare and so on. So
these two things came side by side and when I had the opportunity after going
to England on a British Council scholarship to study at the famous Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts and coming back and later going up to Yale Drama
School and I had time to reflect. I could see how the two interests coincided.
I can see how in the search for identity which was coming throughout the
Caribbean, all the various forms, the speech and the kind of music, the sort of
rhythm, the kind of movement in dance. All the things that would give us
identity could be found, so far as Trinidad is concerned, in the Carnival and
also for the rest of the West Indies, in the folk forms. And I went up to
Jamaica when I got my first appointment with the extra mural department at the
University -this was in 1953 - and immediately started to investigate all the
folk traditions in Jamaica and immediately started to put out Caribbean plays
using Creole and English Creole and French Creole and being abused that anyone
connected with the University should be doing this.
So in that sense, I suppose, the
effort was a pioneering one, but I'm pleased today to see that many of our
reputed playwrights are using the folk forms in many different ways - Dennis
Scott, Walcott himself, Rawle Gibbon. In fact, I'm thinking right now for
Trinidad Carifesta which takes place next year August, might be a good thing to
put out a collection of Carnival plays. I bet you can't tell me when was the
first Carnival play ever written. I think it was in 1845. I found it in the
newspaper - a play written about the Carnival. So it was written in Creole and
I had it translated into French Creole. TIE (Theatre Information Exchange)came
later. I don't know as much about TIE as I should. I've asked Ken (Corsbie) to
let me see his records as he promised, but I haven't seen him yet. I was away.
I was in Africa, and then I went up to the United States where I reside now. I
try my best to keep in touch with what's going on in the West Indies and in
fact I'm going back to New Hampshire to polish up a book I have written which
has been researched for over several years, too many years, on the history of
the Jamaican theatre. Dating back to 1900.
There has been one book written on the
Jamaican theatre which was really dealing with the eighteenth century group of
players from America. They came from England originally to America and then to
Jamaica and the work that they did there, but I am going much further on than
that, right through to the end of the nineteenth century and dealing in several
chapters with the folk forms. Tea meetings for instance which I haven't seen
much written about
and the earliest mention I have found
of those people who delivered humorous speeches in Jamaican dialect; the sort
of thing that Paul Keens Douglas is doing now, that was done back in the 1880s
back in Jamaica. There was a family of them and at least two of them were known
throughout the island for their work. One even went up to Boston where he was
not very successful taking this abroad. So there is a great deal of information
if one really wants to find out about Caribbean theatre. Caribbean theatre in all
its forms is a great deal of research to be done.
There have been developments. I don't
know as much of what's going on in the smaller territories as I should, but in
Jamaica, theatre is now very prolific. The Jamaican Creole is used more
frequently on the stages of Jamaica than is Standard English -not altogether a
good thing, but I'm just reporting a fact.
You could be in Jamaica for a couple
of weeks, as I am every now and then and go to the theatre practically every
night and see a different play. I think this was started by Trevor Rhone, with
his Barn Theatre. He and Yvonne Brewster started the Barn Theatre by just
taking a little barn that they had at the back of Brewster's house and turning
into a theatre
and now almost every barn in the city
is a little theatre and many people write these plays and the plays are very
well attended and there's a lot of money to be made from them. As a result of
this, I don't think that the quality of the work done is such that one
necessarily wants to preserve them. I would have to look hard and long before I
would think of putting out an anthology of these plays for instance and I'm
very conscious of leaving things for posterity. That's why I spend most of my
time now researching and writing, but this is a fact, that there is a great
deal of theatre being done in Jamaica and it's done in the dialect and it's a
lot of sex and a little bit of violence and people love it; it's very
entertaining and it's not a great deal of serious thought except in work being
done by Sistren and work being done by the Drama School which they have in
Jamaica.
Well, as I understand it, Sistren
which was largely the brain-child of Honor Ford Smith began with her attempt,
inspired by the Feminist Movement, to get ordinary Jamaican women to talk about
their lives. They developed the plays themselves and I suppose that during the
rehearsal period, those plays were given shape by Honor Ford Smith who is a
trained dramatist,
but they became very well known and
very well reputed in Jamaica. I was able to see just the very last play that
they did - a two woman play by Honor and I've forgotten the name of her
compatriot.......Carol Lawes, which in fact they did take up to the United
States.
It's very well done, excellent work,
but what is most important, I think, about that movement was getting in the
ordinary Jamaican women to speak and to give them a sense of dignity and
understanding about their lives and how those lives could be shaped and
presented in an artistic form to a public audience. That I think is very
exciting.
It's still a mystery to me how the
Caribbean people who in fact have come from so many different backgrounds and
ancestries could hope to fashion and formulate an identity that typifies,
stands for what is Caribbean. I've been attending some lectures here in
Barbados and heard Mervyn Alleyne. He's someone, if he's still here, you should
certainly get to speak about this whole matter of Caribbean culture and
Caribbean identity and vision. It's a melting pot, everybody knows that. There's
no doubt that the African and in some of the territories, the Indian ancestry,
predominate and therefore one expects to find a greater search among those
descendants for those things that would link them to their past. One has to be
very careful about this. Viv Richards, as you know got himself into hot water
by talking about the cricket team as being African peoples when in fact Rohan
Kanhai and any number of Indian players - people of Indian descent have
contributed magnificently to our cricket. So, any vision has got to be broad.
The most exciting thing at the present
time, in the Caribbean, for me is the spread of Carnival to the metropoles
overseas. What is it that inspires Caribbean peoples - Trinidadians,
Barbadians, Jamaicans - to come together and put on their Carnivals in places
like London, Toronto, Brooklyn, Miami? I guess if they went in sufficient
numbers, to any country in Europe, it would be the same thing.
What is it about this festival that
brings them together in such a joyous celebration of life at a time, mind you,
when the Caribbean is going through some very tough economic times? I mean,
Trinidad is really having a rough time economically now. Yet still, the
Carnival that I saw two week ago would not suggest that. So there must be some
enduring satisfaction in the whole experience that leaves people to not only
themselves participate, but to bring it to a foreigner. Well, it's anybody's
guess and when we talk about using the elements of the Carnival to give us an
identity through our dances and our music and etcetera. It seems that we can't
be too far off the mark because it's there already. All we're doing as artists
is trying to pick and select and re-order these elements of the dances, the
Sailor dance, the Robber talk etcetera and put them into dramas and dances and
musics.
I heard that the Englishman, Paul
Hill, who has been coming down to Trinidad regularly, he's an Englishman who
spent some time in Trinidad with the British Council and when he left, he kept
returning regularly as an adjudicator for the Steelband Music Festival which is
different from Panorama. This is where they play classical music and do much
better I think, than they do at Carnival time, but he has taken some of the
folk music and arranged it in classical forms to be played by steelbands. Now,
he wasn't the first to do this. The first man to do this was Joseph Griffith, a
Barbadian who was with the police band in Trinidad and who actually wrote a
classical piece called Ping Pong Rondo for a performance of my play, The
Ping Pong way back in the
1950s, but it's only an example to show how other people, besides myself and
those few involved in making this connection between the Carnivals and the art
forms, have been doing it and having been showing what can be done. There's a
danger. There's a danger that I see - one can mention the Jamaican experience
in their theatre - of not realising how difficult it is to do this
successfully, of taking the easy way out.
Of course, I have advocated years ago,
decades ago, the use of Creole, but I don't think anything is to be gained by
simply taking the Creole and putting it on the stage as is spoken. I mean, the
great poets and the great writers didn't take English just as it is spoken and
put it on the stage. The artist has to reform and re-fashion what he wants to
say and do and do it in such a way to be pleasing, to be exciting to his
audience.
Well as you know Peter (Minshall),
Peter is a very controversial figure. I have brought him up to my college in
fact to do the theatrical designs for a couple of productions there and he's
done magnificently. He's a very, very talented man. I saw Tantana, which was his latest Carnival production and I
understand how he introduces a sense of theatre both in the designs of his
costumes and in what his masqueraders are supposed to do with those costumes
and I think that it's fine. It may be
that the Parade of the Bands is not the place totake on this theatre, just as
it's not the place for the Robber to give his Robber Talk. There's too much
going on, but I'm sorry I missed Peter's attempt to take his band down to the
Sport's Stadium and to show a theatrical piece developing out of the band. I
think that's fine.
There has been some articles in the
Press saying that Carnival is Carnival; you can never make it into theatre.
Well, experiments are there to be done and as I say, although on the Carnival
days, it would be difficult to get the kind of quiet reflection to put on
theatre, yet still there's a lot to be done. My Dimanche Gras show, Whistling
Charlie and the Monster - that
was in 1964, was perhaps one of the most public satires of the PNM and the
Opposition. Public satire before that ten or fifteen thousand people in
Dimanche Gras and that was an attempt not to turn Carnival into theatre, but to
use the Carnival figures with a theme of political satire attacking both sides,
not partisan and having the audience in stitches. It can be done and the
audience were prepared to sit and listen - which they don't do nowadays
because there's too much noise - as
Russell Winston, the commentator did a great deal of the speaking in which the
political satire was built. Of course we weren't invited to do the Dimanche
Gras the following year, but that's another story.
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