Content area
Full Text
Bennett, Wycliffe, and Hazel Bennett. The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century. Kingston: U of the West Indies P, 2011.
Since Errol Hill's groundbreaking text, The Jamaican Stage 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (1992), there has been a serious need for a monograph that assesses Jamaican theater in the modern period. Wycliffe Bennett and Hazel Bennett's The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century is important because it goes a considerable way towards filling the dearth of information that exists on theater in that country. It outlines the development of Jamaican theater from the early-twentieth century to the present, highlighting various achievements, influences, important landmark institutions, and events as well as individuals and groups who have contributed to the national development of theater.
The book is divided into eighteen chapters categorized into four "Acts" or sections. Act I: "Setting the Scene" provides a historiographical overview of Jamaican theater from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Much of it focuses on business and management and less on technique and aesthetic influences on form. In the first chapter, the authors examine the development of theater juxtaposed with significant phases in Jamaican history. The various periods are delineated as such: the period up to the First World War (pre-1914), the period between the First and Second World Wars (1914-1945), the period between the Second World War and Independence (1945-1962), and the post-Independence period (post-1962). There is a brief discussion of the process of "creolization," particularly as regards the blending of African and European cultures that impacted the formation of theatrical and other performance arts. Notably, the authors conduct a succinct analysis of the predominance of African culture and its denial and suppression during and after the period of slavery. Other chapters delve into the institutions and landmark productions that came to define and influence Jamaican theater in the pre-Independence era, as well as the importance of patronage. One chapter that stands out amongst the rest focuses on the significant production, Jamaica Triumphant, staged in 1937 under the direction of Father Daniel Lord. Jamaica Triumphant was a landmark historical pageant that told the story of the country's history from the pre-Columbian Taino era up to the twentieth century....