Al Creighton

Introduction By Donald Ramotar – Former President of Guyana 12/09/2024 The news on the morning of August 19, 2024, announced the passing of Dave Martins,

It is universally acknowledged in western societies today, especially among theatregoers, that popular theatre is killing off serious theatre. There is a longstanding complaint that comedy, with its direct appeal to laughter and entertainment, has commandeered the market to such an extent that people will no longer buy tickets for serious theatre and only the popular comedies will fill the theatres. The audience for serious plays is so small that producers stage them at the risk of losing money at the box office.

Last week we addressed the proposition that popular theatre is killing off serious theatre because its direct appeal to laughter and light entertainment

It is generally not easy to get reliable information about cultural performances early in the previous century in order to reconstruct historical records. We are therefore very pleased to be able to reprint reviews and first-hand accounts of dramatic performances and cultural events during the period 1946 – 1947 in Georgetown, British Guiana. These are precious documents with priceless information about the theatre, especially, and about the several cultural clubs that mushroomed in the colony between the 1920s and 1940s. Among them is the British Guiana Dramatic Society (BGDS), led by Alice Bhagwandai Singh.

Grace Nichols is among the fine West Indian poets. She is Guyanese, a prize-winning writer with published collections of poetry, one novel for adult audiences and several children’s books. She has built a prominent career in Great Britain where she lives and has been commissioned to read and perform her poems to secondary schools across the UK who study her work for their exams.

Link Show 37 returns to the National Cultural Centre for a repeat performance on October 26 at 8 pm. This, in itself, is a significant event for theatregoers in Guyana who get another opportunity to see the popular annual satirical revue and get some comic relief, particularly if they had missed it when it had its regular season for 2024 in July. But this return is of interest for other reasons which have to do with the state of dramatic performance in Guyana today.

In the Programme Notes for the recently performed KFC Link Show 37 it is written that the director and producers Ron Robinson and Gem Madhoo-Nascimento, when they founded the show, were the first to pay performers and were responsible for the introduction of the practice of fees being paid for work in theatre in Guyana. That is no idle boast. A proper account of it will take us back to a page in the history of theatre in Guyana, and this is how it happened.

At the present time in Guyana, among the most anticipated annual dance productions on stage is Greens & Golds, produced by Kreative Arts and directed by Jonathan and Esther Hamer. The other of major note is Naya Zamana produced by the Guyana Hindu Dharmic Sabha. True to expectation, Greens & Golds 6: The Choreographer and Blockbuster was performed on November 2, at the rebuilt St Rose’s High School Hall.

“The When Time” is the title of a poem by West Indian poet Martin Wylde Carter (June 7, 1927 – December 13, 1997) from the collection Poems of Succession

“The British and other foreigners came. There was a sudden collapse, all we built over centuries suddenly collapsed. We were all reduced to coolies,