Trinidad and Tobago / All works
Theatre
Dream on Monkey Mountain
Derek Walcott · 1970
Synopsis
Makak, an old Black charcoal burner who has not looked at his reflection for thirty years, is thrown into a cell by Corporal Lestrade, a mixed-race man who treats his prisoners as animals, after wrecking a café on market day. Before an improvised court, he recounts his vision: a white woman appeared to him, told him he was descended from African kings and called on him to return to Africa. The dream carries him off, with his friend Moustique, on the road to the lost continent.
Context
Premiered in 1967 in Toronto by the company the author had founded in Port of Spain, the play was published in 1970 in New York with other short plays and broadcast the same year on American television. Staged in 1971 by the Negro Ensemble Company, it won an Obie Award, and the New Yorker's critic hailed it as a rare masterpiece on a modern stage. An epigraph from Frantz Fanon opens the text, which mixes choruses, dances and drums.
Who it is for
A play in verse and prose, with songs and drums, for those who want to read Walcott as a dramatist and to think about the colonial legacy.
Prizes and reception
Obie Award for best foreign play in 1971, after its New York premiere by a Black company.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.