Playboy of the West Indies
Mustapha Matura is now almost a forgotten name but in the 1970s and 1980s he was everywhere. Co-founder of Black Theatre Co-operative (now Nitro), he was also a forerunner of TV comedy, as adept at satirising his own community in series like No Problem! as he was at serious exploration of the legacy of colonialism on stage. This adaptation of J M Synge’s Irish classic, The Playboy of the Western World remains one of his most popular and in Nicolas Kent‘s joyous co-Tricycle and Nottingham Playhouse Theatre revival, it’s easy to see why.
Transposed to Trinidad (Matura’s own birthplace) circa 1950, there is a positively rhapsodic feel to the language as Matura, matching Synge’s lyricism, captures the sounds, and effects of the Caribbean upon his characters.
In an environment inhibited by poverty and backwardness, there is nonetheless a recaptured pride here and an extraordinary beauty attained in the stolen moments of love expressed between Kobna Holdbrook-Smith‘s struggling `playboy’, Ken – the young stranger whose reported killing of his father has suddenly endowed him with a reputation he could never have imagined – and Sharon Duncan-Brewster‘s feisty Peggy, the daughter of the local bar-owner.
But it is only for a moment. Reality breaks in, albeit of a tragic-comic variety. And that is still the wonderful thing about Matura’s Playboy as with Synge’s – its interweaving of the light-hearted and horrific (you can see where Martin McDonagh first got his ideas) , fantasy with honesty and gullibility against exposure of the cult of the killer-hero.
In some ways that exposure resonates even more strongly here than in the original. As Mac, Ken’s supposedly dead father staggers in once again (cut down at least twice by his bullied, desperate son, he refuses to die), Ken, recently feted by the villagers for his reggata prowess is seen, trussed up as if for a lynching by the self-same people. Murder, patricide has suddenly become, in Peggy’s words, `that, nasty, dirty thing out there.’
A vivid moment in a production of many, Adrianne Lobel‘s wooden lean-to shebeen takes us to the heart of a community in which Malcolm Fredericks‘ rum-soaked patriarch, Mikey, presides with bombastic serenity over a gloriously individualised ensemble from Ben Bennett‘s spineless but aspiring suitor, Stanley, to Shango Baku and Larrington Walker‘s couple of old soaks, from Joy Richardson‘s lascivious obeah woman, Mama Benin to Remi Wilson and Tracey Saunders‘ goggle-eyed young hero-worshippers. They don’t come better. Perfect alternative Christmas fare.
– Carole Woddis (reviewed at the Tricycle Theatre)
