"Good Evening," she said in that smooth, BBC-cultured voice that is instantly identifiable as Barbara Assoon's. The crowd she was addressing at last month's Media Excellence Awards cheered in a spontaneous eruption of the good regard that had won Assoon her Service Recognition Award that night.
Assoon has been part of the radio landscape for something like 30 years as an announcer - even longer if you consider that she made her Trinidadian Radio debut in the soap opera, The Edwards Family, in 1957. To this generation she is only a voice; few know that she is a stage and TV actor, as well as a founding member of the seminal Little Carib dance movement.
She was reluctant to be interviewed. "Why do you want to know about me?" she asked at her Newtown apartment last week. Assoon, a hoarder, has stacks of envelopes and albums full of the clippings accumulated during her long life in performing. I could go through them, she consented, but no interview.
Delving into the first album, I find a young Assoon, fresh faced and smiling in almost every shot. Among her first plays was Peter Ustinov's Indifferent Shepherd, which Whitehall players staged and in which Errol Jones appeared. "Newcomer Errol Jones did well," wrote a reviewer, "With experience, he will learn to harness his emotions and use them profitably." Assoon, the same review said, played "a worldly-wise young woman…just the opposite to what the author intended ". Other than that, there was rarely a bad review in the clippings file, although Assoon was diligent and thorough in her gathering of any small reference to her work.
Dr. Eric Williams reviewed another production she was in, Errol Hill's Square Peg and Errol John's The Tout, close on the heels of Shepherd. He sang the praises of Assoon and her co-star, Errol John, with whom she shared the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene as an interlude in the production.
John is best known for his award-winning play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. Their fortunes, his and Assoon's, are closely tied. She acted in stage, TV and radio versions of the play, often alongside John himself, who, she said, died "without recognition".
Among the clippings is a letter dated 1949, congratulating Assoon on her "magnificent" Juliet. "I can't decide if you dance better than you act, or you act better than you dance," wrote the letter's author. "…You have it in you to made a positive contribution to cultural development in Trinidad". It was signed "Sir" Hugh."
"I think it was Beryl (Mc Burnie) who used to call him that, long before he was knighted," mentioned Assoon, looking at the 50-year-old letter from Hugh Wooding, who would go on to become the first Chief Justice appointed after Independence. The letter congratulated Assoon too, on winning a British Council scholarship to study drama in the UK, a scholarship she tendered at the Bristol Old Vic.
There, Assoon studied voice and movement, and such esoteric things as fencing. She still has her foil. She took it out to show me, carefully assuming the position, the heel of her front foot at a perfect right angle to the instep of her back foot.
"Fencing is the only sport that allows you to work your whole body," she said. "And when you lunge…" Quickly the back leg stretches out, front leg crouched, foil arm extended. "It's in the wrist," she added, flicking the foil gently.
At the Old Vic she also learned ballet, which she didn't have an opportunity to do when she was a child growing up in a large family in Port of Spain. She thinks she got her natural bent for dance from he father, a French-Chinese acrobat. "I always wanted to be an acrobat," she mused. She never got the chance; the closest she came was being cast as the impish Puck in A Midsummer's Night Dream, a role that required her to do cartwheels and flips.
Assoon is tiny, about 5'2", and even now retains the slender dancer's build that she had 50 years ago. Her face is a hard-to-define blend of racial characteristics, and she won't say exactly what went into the pool to make her. "Heinz 57 varieties. I am a mixture of everything. Who can tell?"
She spent some 15 years in England, acting in what seems like dozens of TV and radio plays, and a number of stage plays. Her reviews were consistently good, with few exceptions. (Feminist writer Doris Lessing described as "strident" her portrayal of the tart in the Royal Court Theatre staging of Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, but everybody else found her just fine.)
Assoon's first TV role was Tituba, the black servant in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, played opposite a young Sean Connery as Proctor. "No," she hurried to assure me, "I don't know Sean Connery. I haven't seen him since…"
"But you did work with him?" I asked. "So you know him."
"I suppose," she conceded, unwilling to ascribe too much relevance to working with Connery before he hit the big time.
While working in the BBC radio dramas, she worked with other West Indian actors, among them Basdeo Panday. "I don't know (if he was good). He had a very small part," she said lightly. She herself was named above the credits in the blurb for The Consolation Prize, one of two plays they co-starred in.
She came home to Trinidad in 1968, two years after her English husband, an accountant, died. She brought with her Peter, her five-year-old son. In an interview with Earl Lovelace, then an Express journalist, she said she wanted to stay but would only do it if she could find work.
"There was no theatre, really, it was still in the amateur stage," she recalled last week. "I was doing it professionally al these years, that was how I earned my living."
Radio Trinidad needed an announcer, and Assoon auditioned at June Gonzales' request. She became a duty announcer, then left for another six months in the U.K. "I had no intention of getting into radio, not in that way," she remembered. "I didn't know what I wanted to do, really."
Nonetheless, Assoon came back and took over the Radio Trinidad Woman's Programme. She is still active on air, and trains broadcasters for both TV and radio; the list of her students is a who's who in today's media.
She no longer dances, and her last stage role was in the 1990 staging of Derek Walcott's Remembrance, alongside the late Norman Beaton (TV's Desmond from Caryl Phillips' British series). But she's willing to go anywhere for a part, even now, as long as her passage and accommodation are booked and all arrangements are made by the producer. "I think it's time for someone to call me," she said mischievously.