It is not widely known that the Caribbean island of Jamaica enjoys a tradition of live theatre that may well be second to none in the English-speaking world, save only in England itself. Conquered from Spain in 1655, the island boasted an active theatre as early as 1682, not very long after public playgoing had returned to England following the Cromwellian interregnum. Records are silent about theatre for the next several decades, but by the 1730s troupers from England had begun regular visits which culminated in the two long residencies of the famed Hallam Company that came to Virginia from London in 1752. Under the senior Hallam the company journeyed to Jamaica in 1754 and remained there, after Hallam's death, until 1758 when they returned to America, led by David Douglass. Again from 1775 to 1785 the company sojourned in Jamaica, waiting out the War of Independence, this time under Lewis Hallam junior. The record of their performances in the island has been chronicled in Richardson Wright's book Revels in Jamaica (1937), which has recently been reissued.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

The Sistren Theatre Collective came together in 1977 as the result of an initiative of the ruling People's National Party in Jamaica. As part of an extensive special employment programme in the 1970s, the Jamaican Government had created opportunities for women to receive basic job training. One group of women who had been involved in a training programme as Basic School aides decided to put on a play for Workers' Week. Through the good offices of the recently established Women's Bureau, the group was able to work on this project with Honor Ford-Smith who was a tutor at the Jamaica National School of Drama at the time. Their collaborative effort resulted in the creation of a sketch, Downpression Get a Blow (1977), based on the women's domestic and political experiences. In the months and years that followed, the group went from strength to strength, creating plays from their shared experiences; working with other groups to use dramatic scenarios as a way of problem-solving and ultimately establishing a permanent company with its own research unit, community workshops and silkscreen printing activities. At the time of writing in 1989, ten of the original thirteen members are still with the group and two new members have been added. Another ten to twelve women and men are employed by the collective as resource and support staff.

The development of so-called ‘Carnival theatre’ in the Anglophone Caribbean has been steady and important. Rawle Gibbons, a young dramatist/director presently heading the recently established Creative Arts Centre at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies in his native Trinidad, has learned to utilize ritual and festival in his playwriting in increasingly effective ways. I, Lawah is his latest play, and in it he articulates, in theatrical form, a belief in the importance of Caribbean tradition as a revitalizing, invigorating element for the community after the enervating period of colonial rule and the ever-present threat of neocolonial inertia taking its place.