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From ‘Flat Mate’ to ‘Champagne and Sky Juice’, Basil Dawkins sticks to the script

Published:Thursday | October 27, 2022 | 12:05 AMMichael Reckord/Gleaner Writer
 Ian Allen
Ian Allen
 Ian Allen
Ian Allen
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William Shakespeare observes in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts….”

For the past couple of decades, when Basil Dawkins is working at the Little Little Theatre, his twin roles there have been playwright and producer of the current play. In recent times, he may also be discovered at the Edna Manley College’s School of Drama directly across Arthur Wint Drive.

There he’ll be playing a third role, playwriting tutor. He’s in a teaching frame of mind and wants to pass on what he knows about playwriting.

“I may not necessarily be a teacher,” he told The Gleaner in a recent interview, “but I know how to write a play.”

That he does. With some 40-plus of his plays and productions mounted to date, he is Jamaica’s most prolific playwright.

All, but one, have been successful, and even the one he called a “flop”, Parson and Mrs Jones, taught him a lot. His goal now is to get his students to be “better playwrights” than he is. From a stool in the school’s After Dark Theatre, he revealed some of the life lessons learnt and the approaches he has taken to his craft since his first play in 1980.

The play, Flat Mate, was a huge crowd-pleaser and because that success fulfilled a challenge he had consciously set himself, he set himself another: write a two-hander. (He challenges himself with every play, he says.) Unfortunately – he thought at the time – Parson and Mrs Jones failed miserably, with half of the audience walking out during the intermission on opening night.

As he had a comfortable corporate job, he decided to exit the theatre, stage left. However, intrigued by the assurance of his friend, Trevor Rhone, that every playwright had at least one flop in him and he should try to learn from it, he made enquiries about classes at the School of Drama. They did not fit into his work schedule and he turned within, for the first time consciously ruminating on what he had done right with creating Flat Mate.

“I started to write again, concentrating not on [getting] a full house and the bank manager,” he said, referring essentially to the focus of a producer, “but on character, problems, and plot. We came up with Couples, which, with Keith Noel directing, was again a phenomenal success.”

The play’s storyline – about “switching” between two couples, one with no children but wanting one, the other with a child and wanting no more – had great popular appeal, Dawkins said, giving one important factor in its success.

For his next production, Same Song, Different Tune, about his experience as a country boy come to town and encountering the city’s different value systems, he got another top-class director, Lloyd Reckord, and some well-known actors, including Buddy Pouyatt and Barbara McCalla. It did well, and he was on his way to finding the success formula, he said. So he decided to face the challenge of another attempt at a two-character play.

“I was married then,” he said, “and my wife was against it.”

But determined to have a play that was even more successful than his previous hits, he put all the tested ingredients into the project: the best director (Reckord); best actors (Charles Hyatt and Leonie Forbes); the best set designer available, Henry Muttoo, and a popular plot.

Set in 1980, not long before the general election, the story is about a husband and wife with different political loyalties, the economic collapse and the husband’s loss of a prestigious job. The play was a smash hit, both locally and abroad – for it was the beginning of regular tours to North America and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean.

Champagne and Sky Juice established me as a playwright,” Dawkins said, a big smile on his face. “Up to then, despite the successes, I hadn’t thought of myself as a playwright. I didn’t have to worry about writing a two-hander again.”

By far Dawkins’ most important student is his daughter, Toni-Kay ‘TK’ Dawkins. With difficulty, he persuaded her to join him on the stage and to date she has directed the last handful of his plays. Interestingly, she started with her father’s third two-hander, Toy Boy, and is now hard at work on staging the company’s annual December 27 show.

No Hope for Hopey mirrors much of the playwright’s early life. The main country-born character is poor, black and fatherless. (Dawkins didn’t meet his biological father until he was 65, and he recently finished a play about the relationship.) Unlike Dawkins, though, Hopey lives in Kingston’s inner city and seeks comfort in a Pentecostal church.

entertainment@gleanerjm.com