Chapter 5 - The challenge of change: the dramatist after Dream

Summary

Walcott's quest for a West Indian drama that would affirm the personhood and humanity of the common people, and in a style which draws crucially on popular expressive and performance modes, was for all practical purposes fulfilled in Ti-Jean and Dream, with their stylized, poetic representation of the burden of history inherited by ‘the black, the despairing, the poor’ (CP, 29). This achievement produced one kind of answer to the apparent absence of West Indian heroes.

However, from his earliest dramatic efforts, Walcott had shown a penchant for variousness of theatrical subject-matter and form. So, as we have seen for example, from before Ti-Jean and Dream took centre-stage, he had been writing Franklin, a ‘straight’ naturalistic play. Moreover, as early as Franklin, we find a quite different kind of play, The Charlatan, Walcott's first musical play, in the vein of light comedy and even farce. After going to live in Trinidad at the end of the 1950s, Walcott, not surprisingly, developed the Trinidadian, carnival-calypso features of the play, which was eventually performed by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop along with Franklin in their 1973–4 season. Like Franklin, The Charlatan was never published.

The mode of light comedy leaning towards farce was taken up again in Beef, No Chicken. On the other hand, the success of The Joker of Seville, with music by Galt MacDermot, who had done the music for The Charlatan, encouraged Walcott in his pursuit of the musical (as distinct from the play with music) and of Broadway.