Yvonne Brewster Knihy

For more almost forty years, Jamaica's Barn Theatre was a crucial part of the development of a Caribbean theatre that extended beyond the Europhile elite. When it began in 1965, there were scarcely any plays written by Caribbean playwrights to perform. By its presence The Barn encouraged the work of dramatists such as Dennis Scott, Ashani Harrison and Carmen Tipling, and above all the work of Trevor Rhone, with whom Yvonne Brewster enjoyed a close if sometimes tumultuous theatrical relationship. Yvonne Brewster's splendid retelling of the making of the Barn captures the phenomenon of youthful ambition, creative optimism and rollicking intellectual excitement that characterized the spirit of young people fired with the zeal of imagining a postcolonial self as distinct from a colonized self.

This is a wide-ranging selection by theatre director Yvonne BrewsterBoy with Beer by Paul Boakye is a funny and sexy story of a Guardian-reading gay photographer who finds his fantasy "African Prince" - "Boakye's writing is brash and exceedingly fresh…Boy with Beer has cutting edge" (Independent); A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death by Fred D'Aguiar takes Yeats's famous poem and twists it into a rhapsody from a colonial perspective in WW2 Scotland - "A tough, warm and thrillingly individual play full of live-wire humour and athletic assurance…The writing is reckless but controlled, the humour dark, ribald and dangerous…simply bursts with that fiery energy of which true theatre is made" (John Peter, Sunday Times).Munda Negra by Bonnie Greer examines the heart of darkness in Western civilisation - "Greer is clearly a writer of imagination" (The Times); Scrape off the Black by Tunde Ikoli is an East End mixed-race family drama - "Ikoli's play is funny, wry and at times positively searing" (Jim Hiley, Listener); Talking in Tongues by Winsome Pinnock explores issues around mixed race matches in modern-day Britain - "Winsome Pinnock, a writer of extraordinary promise, is here expressing with guile and tenacity, many unsayable things about sexual and social miscegenation…she writes with enormous verve." (Michael Coveney, Observer)