1. Rawle Gibbons was born in 1950 in Trinidad. Brecht has been an important influence on him, and on other Third World playwrights such as Femi Osofisan of Nigeria. He has directed Mother Courage (U.W.I. Creative Arts Centre, Trinidad 1988).Google Scholar In other plays he has directed, Gibbons shows his preference for theatrical works which express strategies for liberation. He has directed work for the radical popular theatre group, Sistren, injamaica, (Bellywoman Bangarang, Jamaica School of Drama, 1982)Google Scholar, Walcott's fable of popular revolt Tijean and his Brothers (1984, 1987)Google Scholar, Scott, 's Dog (1980)Google Scholar, and a dramatization of the radical Trinidadian historian James, C. L. R.'s The Black Jacobins (1975, 1979)Google Scholar. Gibbons, 's work ManoGoogle Scholar was produced by the Caribbean Theatre Workshop, 1973, (no available finished text). His second play, Shepherd was produced by the Jamaica School of Drama and toured to Barbados for Carifesta, 1981.

2. I, Lawah (still unpublished), was first performed by the Jamaica School of Drama in early 1986, directed by Trevor Nairne and then later in the same year by the Pan-Caribbean Theatre Company, a special company assembled for the production at the Commonwealth Institute, London, during the Caribbean Writers’ Conference. After this, there were two performances in Barbados, since then the company has been disbanded, for lack of funding. Some of the best actors in the region, such as Errol Jones and Kendal Hippolyte took part. References are to the unpublished manuscript given the author of this article by the playwright.

Gibbons chooses to spell Lawah with an ‘h’ but it can also be spelled Lawa. I have used the latter to denote the figure and the former spelling for the character in the play, i.e. using it as his proper name as well as his social role. As in all rituals, individual personality and public role-playing becomes one.

3. Traditional Enactments of Trinidad: Towards a Third Theatre M.Phil, thesis, U.W.I., St Augustine, 01 1979.Google Scholar (Enactments in text following).

4. See Plays for Today, ed. Hill, Errol (Harlow: Longman 1985).Google Scholar Originally written 1956; first produced 1957, University Players, Jamaica. In this form, it had no music. Subsequently Hill revised the play and rewrote the calypsonian's part, putting in more calypso verse and songs. He changed the play from a revenge play to a comedy. See also ‘West Indian Drama’ in The Artist in West Indian Society, U.W.I. Extra-Mural Department, n.d. 7–24.Google Scholar

5. Dream on Monkey Mountain and other Plays, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1970).Google Scholar

6. Remembrance and Pantomime (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).Google Scholar

7. See, particularly, Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).Google Scholar Walcott's physical locations (St Lucia, then Trinidad in adult life, now mainly Boston), have become more and more urban, more and more removed from the masses and their festivals.

8. Plays for Today, see n. 4.Google Scholar

9. Speech quoted by Gibbons, , Enactments, 47.Google Scholar

10. Scott's view represents the ancient theme of the release of communal tension through individual sacrifice. Several Caribbean authors, such as Walcott, Derek in Dream on Monkey MountainGoogle Scholar have expressed the idea that racism and oppression could be expiated by the willingness of a white person to give up life. In Scott, 's Echo in the BoneGoogle Scholar, however the white man, Crew, who dies, is murdered. Interestingly a woman seems a more likely willing victim, with enough guilt, and enough feeling, to put herself in that role, as does Thérèse in I, Lawah.

11. See particularly, Boal, AugustoTheatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Brook, PeterThe Empty Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)Google Scholar; Grotowski, JerzyTowards a Poor Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen 1968)Google Scholar; Soyinka, Wole ‘The Fourth Stage: Through the Myths of Ogun to the Origins of Yoruba Tragedy’ in Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

12. The programme for this production was also the programme for the Pan-Caribbean Company's performances of Dennis Scott's Dog which was the other work prepared for the Caribbean Writers Conference, Commonwealth Institute, London, 1986, as part of the nation-wide British Caribbean Focus Festival. Earl Warner, the well-known Caribbean director who has also worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London as well as theatres in the USA, was responsible for the London creation of Gibbons, 's I, Lawah.Google Scholar Warner has been another major figure in the development of ritual and festival theatre in the Caribbean in the past few years.

13. See Thompson, Robert Farris, African Art in Motion (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974).Google Scholar

14. There are other plays which deal with Carnival, but not as seriously or originally as Gibbons, does in I, Lawah.Google Scholar See, for example, Jarvis, Euton and Amoroso, RonaldThe Master of Carnival in Three Caribbean Plays ed. Hill, Errol (Caribbean: Longman 1979).Google Scholar