Content area
Full text
THE BIG LIFE: THE SKA MUSICAL. Book and lyrics by Paul Sirett, music by Paul Joseph. Directed by Glint Dyer. Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. 21 May 2004.
Traveling to Stratford in East 15 takes a while on the London Underground, but was well worth the journey to witness the vibrant world premiere of a new musical that now has plans and backing to transfer to the West End. If so, The Big Life will be the first Black British play or musical to ever be performed in the commercial sector of London theatre. The subtitle, "The Ska Musical," firmly places it in the early 1950s when ska was the popular music of Jamaica, preceding the rise of reggae. It is the latest in a series of musicals that have been developed in this theatre that has a historic commitment to its local community and more recently to the contemporary urban music scene. The musical's title is taken from Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners (1956): "One day the ship dock in London and he went to Piccadilly Circus and watch the big life."
The narrative premise of the work is taken from Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, in which four men devote themselves to ascetic study for three years; to avoid distraction, they ban women from their presence. All the men agree to this plan even though one of them is already in love and committed to a woman. Here the story is transposed to the middle of the twentieth century and reworked for the Windrush generation, the term that defines Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain with British passports to seek a better life. (The SS Empire Windrush was the first boat to arrive in the United Kingdom from Jamaica and other islands in 1948. The 1948 Nationality Act offered colonial subjects British citizenship and the opportunity to go to work in the "mother country.") The first scene...