Review of the Play March

March to Caroni

Review

March to Caroni was an experimental play which engaged the audience, not so much as participators in the drama, but more as willing or unwilling props in an almost virtual reality staging. The audience followed the procession through the streets of the St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies in an enactment of the 1970’s Black Power march to the Caroni in Central Trinidad and Tobago. The Movement is led by the charismatic Geddes Granger, played by Jared Prima, and featuring other key historical figures in the earlier Labour Rights movement such as Uriah Butler.

The first scene opens with the shouts of a homeless woman Queenie, played by Bernadette Inniss, trying to assert her long lost respectability to the passers-by on the street, which is actually the steps of the auditorium, alongside the audience’s seats. Her characterisation immediately conjures up feelings of a post colonial displacement and personifies the destitution of descendents of African slavery who have lost their cultural and historical identity. From here a sub-plot develops around a family of Afro-Trinidadians whose son, Gerard, feels the insatiable desire to cut loose of his post colonial bondage and join the Black Power Movement. His mother, Ma Jacobs, played by Camille Quamina-George, tries to hold on to the status quo in unsuccessful attempt to preserve the lives of her children especially Gerard, who cannot resist the tidal wave of Negritude. The Directors cleverly use the aside and soliloquy in showing the deep emotional prayers of a mother who knows she cannot bridge the ever widening generation gap between her and her son. A silent character of Tingerlay, played by Anton Brewster, heightens the dramatic effects of the discourses between mother and son by using the antics of a mime.

The debate over the efficacy of the movement is aired by discussions between Tallboy, played by Anthony Dolland and the Cuthbert, Jeremy King, on a stage located...