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Overview
With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.Synopsis
This is a wide-ranging selection by theatre director Yvonne Brewster
Boy 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)