This chapter's subject is Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord. Despite their current obscurity in the historical canon, Reckord's plays deserve visibility within the history of postwar British theater for at least two reasons. First, they mark one early postwar instance of a fruitful, creative relationship between a West Indian artist settled in London and an influential British cultural institution. Reckord's plays are best evaluated not simply as “West Indian” drama, but as a part of the Royal Court's tradition of socially aware alternative theater. Reckord's desire to create drama that tackled the thorny issues of colonialism, race identity, and repression dovetailed with the Royal Court's own mandate to produce fresh, topical, and challenging British plays. This shared mandate allowed Reckord to create a complex picture of West Indian migration and race prejudice that took into account the effects of British imperialism, social conditions, and especially class identity. It also allowed him to position the issue of migration and racism not as a special, foreign “problem,” but as just one element in a matrix of domestic British ills.

Secondly, Reckord's work engaged with, and contested, two of the era's defining dramatic themes and narratives: the dominant “race relations” narrative of racial transgression and domestic neurosis, discussed in the previous chapter on postwar film; and what was perhaps the Royal Court's most cherished subject and aesthetic, working-class social realism or the “kitchen sink” drama. Both of these themes were, in large part, the creations of white, British-born writers and producers. Reckord used his own distinctive perspective not to reject them as a framework for his plays, but to reshape them. In the process, he expanded the scope, texture, and subtlety of the Royal Court's oeuvre. Reckord's plays in this sense encourage a re-evaluation of the postwar British theater story. It was, to be sure, a story about representing new class identities and engaging frankly with the dilemmas of postwar society, but Reckord's plays show that London's West Indian settlers and, indeed, the West Indies themselves, were active shapers of that story as well. In other words, Reckord understood that questions of class were also questions of race.