The Black Plays Series
‘Black theatre has been expanding for several years now and refuses to stop’: New Statesman Critic Benedict Nightingale
BLACK PLAYS
Selected and introduced by Yvonne Brewster
Published by Methuen New Theatrescripts ISBN 0 413 15710 0
Including:
- Chameleon by Michael Ellis
- Lonely Cowboy by Alfred Fagon
- The Lower Depths by Tunde Ikoli
- Basin by Jacqueline Rudet
Selected by theatre director Yvonne Brewster the four plays in this volume introduce the reader to some of the highlights of a particularly creative period for Black Theatre. Included are Michael Ellis’s CHAMELEON concerning what happens when two tactics for coping with racism at work come into conflict, the late Alfred Fagon’s Lonely Cowboy, a Brixton café western about a couple who open up a café not far from Brixton’s ‘frontline’. Tunde Ikoli’s adaptation of the Lower Depths in which Gorky’s Russian classic is up rooted from the cellars of St. Petersburg and re-set in a seedy London East End boarding house. and Rudet’s Basin an ebullient portrayal of lesbian love.
BLACK PLAYS: TWO
Edited by Yvonne Brewster
Published by Methuen New TheatreScripts ISBN 0 413 61470 0
Including
- The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace
- A Rock In Water by Winsome Pinnock
- Blood Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi
- Job Rocking by Benjamin Zephaniah
With Black Plays Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Cant Dance adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival night, Winsome Pinnock’s A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival, Blood Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten percent of Britain’s black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia, and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a ‘dub’ opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the pleasures of work to the unemployed.
BLACK PLAYS 3
Selected and introduced by Yvonne Brewster
Published by Methuen New Theatrescripts ISBN 0 413 69130 6
Including
- Boy with Beer by Paul Boakye
- A Jamaican Airman Forsees His Death by Fred D’Aguiar
- Talking in Tongues by Winsome Pinnock
- Munda Negra by Bonnie Greer
- Scrape Off the Black by Tunde Ikoli
Volume Three in Methuen’s series of Black Plays provides another wide ranging selection by theatre director Yvonne Brewster: Paul Boakye Boy With Beer reveals a funny and sexy story of a Guardian-reading gay photographer who finds his fantasy ‘African Prince’; poet and novelist Fred D’AguiarJamaican Airman is a rhapsody on a colonial theme set in World War 2 Scotland; Bonnie Greer’s Munda Negra examines the heart of darkness in Western Civilization;Tunde Ikoli’s much revived Scrape Off the Black is an East End mixed race family drama and Winsome Pinnock’s wonderfully atmospheric Talking in Tongues explores the tangled racial and sexual desires in modern day Britain.