left a vacuum in Trinidad Theatre
By Judy Stone
(1988)
So many people have expressed their appreciation of Theatre Life's ongoing Tribute to our theatre practitioners, I really regret how seldom these days I have a column free to devote to it.
The last tribute was in February, and now here we are in May, to look first at the actor who, perhaps more than all the others, made his individual impact on that first quarter century of our independent theatre.
WILBERT HOLDER came from Guyana to Trinidad as a young man already honoured for his acting achievements with Georgetown's Theatre Guild. For his first appearance on the Trinidad stage, he created the role of Mr. Bucket in the Company of Players production of Douglas Archibald's best loved and most often repeated work, "The Rose Slip".
He subsequently worked for a while, as actor and director, with the Trinidad Dramatic Club. It was not until the late sixties that Wilbert joined the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and began working under Derek Walcott, who was to have a profound effect on Wilbert's career as an artist.
Wilbert came to consider himself a "Walcottian actor". He created or redefined several Walcott roles, including Rude Buoy in "O Babylon", and Jordan in "Remembrance". The role of Jackson, the essential Caribbean man, in Walcott's two-actor Robinson Crusoe comedy "Pantomime", written specifically for Wilbert.
After Derek's departure from the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1976, Wilbert worked with other companies, including Derek's Warwick Productions. The role for which Wilbert will probably be best remembered, and for which he received the widest acclaim, was in Athol Fugard's "Sizwe Bansi is Dead", directed by Helen Camps in 1979 for All Theatre Productions.
GOVERNMENT AWARD
Wilbert won a rare Government Award for his firecracker interpretation of Styles. Up to 1987, he and Errol Jones (Bansi) continued to perform the play on tour, receiving standing ovations around the Caribbean, and in the United States. Wilbert also performed in an Actors Theatre production of "Pantomime" in Minnesota, to glowing reviews.
Other productions for which Wilbert will be remembered include "Smile Orange" and "Woza Albert", and films such as "Bim", "The Caribbean Fox" and "The Gold of the Amazon Women". He was more often behind the cameras than in front of them and his crowning achievement as a film director was the outstanding and deservedly popular television series "Turn of the Tide".
He also directed for and acted on radio, and voiced countless commercials. He was one of our most successful interviewers, and in 1983 became co-presenter of TTT's "Community Dateline", a role for which his quicksilver wit, his urbane manner, his encyclopaedic knowledge and his ferreting curiosity eminently suited him.
Wilbert directed surprisingly little for the stage, but he was at work last year directing Walcott's comedy "Beef. No Chicken", when he suffered a mild heart attack which preceded his death.
QUICK MIND
He left a vacuum in Trinidad theatre that will never be filled till we find another actor with a like drive and energy, quick mind, infallible memory, gift for mimicry, instinctive command of theatre skills, and in Walcott's term, "a talent for crisis".
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NEWSMAKER
WILBERT HOLDER
Trinidad Express (1987)
There are no monuments to him, no awards given in his name, no plays or poetry about his life. Very little has been written on his life's work. It is, sadly, on his death, that most people will begin to understand the impact that Wilbert Holder made on Caribbean theatre.
Holder's death on Tuesday night, one month after his 51st birthday, plunged the theatre world into mourning and brought to an untimely end what would no doubt have been a brilliant directing career. Holder was into the first act of the Brenda Hughes' production "Beef, No Chicken", which he was directing, when he suffered the mild heart attack which preceded his death. In the words of playwright Raoul Pantin, "he died as he lived, directing a play, and not many people can say that."
Actor Errol Jones, who teamed with Holder for some of this country's most memorable performances, said as a director Holder was, "now coming into his own." He directed the much-talked-about "Turn of the Tide " television series, and last year did Pantin's "Seasons" in the National Drama Festival.
Jones described Holder's ability to understand and interpret many characters at the same time as "a rare gift" and the strong point of his directing ability.
When he came to Trinidad in 1962 Holder was already an accomplished actor, a former member of the theatre guild in Guyana.
Described as a "Walcottian" actor, holder played lead roles in no less than nine Derek Walcott plays. (It was as "Rude Buoy" in "O Babylon" (1976) that Holder met his wife Corinne, who played a "Rudette". They married five years later and had a daughter, Zia, who is two and a half years old).
But it was for his roles as "Style" and "Bantu" in South African Athol Fugard's "Sizwe Bansi is Dead" that Holder was perhaps most celebrated. The production, which featured the famous Holder/Jones duo, is almost legendary, and some describe it as the finest theatre production this country has seen.
The brilliance of his performance earned him a special award from the National Drama Association, and the play took him on extensive tours in the Caribbean. That same year, 1980, he was awarded a grant from the Caribbean US Theatre Exchange (Caribust) in recognition of his work in the theatre.
Other highlights of his career include "Woza Albert" in which he played alongside Noel Blandin, Trevor Rhone's "Smile Orange", Raoul Pantin's "Bim" and two special NBC film appearances, "Dream on Monkey Mountain" and "Gold of the Amazon Women".
"His spirit was the spirit of the Caribbean people," said Pantin, and indeed the exuberant Holder spent much of his time between the islands performing and conducting workshops, twice representing this country in Carifesta: Jamaica '76 and Barbados '81.
Earlier this year the Holder/Jones team performed "Sizwe Bansi" in St. Vincent, where Holder conducted workshops in voice and movement, and "Boesman and Lena" (another Fugard play) in St. Lucia, his last stage performance. Internationally, Holder performed in Walcott's "Pantomime" in Minnesota in 1983.
The multi-faceted Holder was not limited to the stage, and tackled the radio plays he did on Radio 610 between 1970 and 1972 with equal energy, functioning as director for the series "Theatre 15".
To those who knew him, there seemed no end to the talents Holder possessed.
He was, in Pantin's words, "crazy, offbeat, insecure, uptight, arrogant and contemptuous, but I love him".
Holder's quick wit and easy manner will be missed on "Dateline", Trinidad and Tobago Television's morning talk show, on which he began as presenter in 1983.
In the words of actor Tony Hall: "The most important thing in his life was the theatre." Said veteran dancer Beryl McBurnie: "In the history of Trinidad and Tobago we have never lost a greater soul."
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THAT WILBERT HOLDER
By LeRoy Clarke
(1987)
If Wilbert Holder failed to achieve his goal, the only consolation that warmed him, wrapped in the shroud of his end, must have been that he tried the impossible - to become an artist in this place - that must, as of an accord with the lost of the world, avoid at all cost the loftiness of Arts, Philosophy and Science; he would have recognised the enemy of those who pursue ideas.
His crime was that he had natural gifts that suit him to be an actor of no meagre genre. Wilbert the actor, the seducer! The ultimate reward is punishment. Slander and exile in the mind of every encore.
Wilbert failed to achieve because it was too easy for him to stand out, to fill the space, to star. He needed a people, he needed plays, he needed a theatre. Wilbert the actor became a director, he most probably was writing a play in secret and also saving-up money to build a theatre!
His genius suffered the inevitable that the few of genius in the arts, that this country that revels in mediocrity has "produced" so far - early death for genius in search of its voice, more precisely, genius longing for itself, longing for reflection in a system of critical supports.
These limits imprisoned him, greyed him with disgust and made him a pest to others but never less than he was to himself. We must oblige ourselves to go beyond gossip and to gain for ourselves through sound scrutiny and analysis the root of the dissatisfaction that artist feels; his insatiable passion to interrupt us, to unsettle our foundations!
I did not like Wilbert's personality but I respected his courage and talent to be an artist in this desert. I always wondered what it would be like to see him up against the reflective powers of the likes of Roscoe Lee Browne and James Earl Jones To see him removed from our poverty and binding faith in filialistic and "fren-fren' indulgences and thrown into the real fires of the real dramas of the real world.
A world of drama woven among other elements by psychological subtlety and an intense eye for structural detail and relationships. To see him arriving with new victories and in concert with discriminate energies in the spell of word and movement - the deed in gesture!
Wilbert had the tools, special tools that are entrusted to a meagre few in the whole wide world; there is the superb Errol Jones, the aphoristic Errol Sitahal, the promising Noel Blandin, the exceptional Joy Ryan and the textual disposition of Joan Osborne - there are only two more!
Actors who know how to work the character fully (leaving themselves behind) and from minute nuances through delicate uproarings pay strict homage to any potential that describes the graph; actors who know the depth of thoroughness and precision that will cause a new reality to emerge and offer up its distinct presence.
These actors die (remember Ermine Wright) longing for a theatre that will embrace them and bosom their experiments. A people is charged with that noble responsibility to provide it, but the tragedy is that as a people we are absent for over a hundred years.
It is in this scaled exclamation that Wilbert knew the futility of a moth chasing after light in the confines of closed glass. There, he resonated with wit and charm that he quickly snatched back as if he were stingy and a playful commoner!
Funny, embarrassed and bold, somewhat off-balanced in a sense of juxtaposition, he wore the quick change between curious, bored and baffled. His was a convulsive energy that gave his head a bird-like and untiring alertness.
But this is intensity, no matter the contradictions, that shapes his craft, that empowers his skill that held separate his immersion in on one hand and his detachment from on the other, in the complex flow of exigencies in the drama that must not cease to endure.
Here is where Wilbert was mistaken for everything else but the artist he was, striving for ethos - his El Tucuche - that all too personal and powerful way, that original and singular choice for seeing and for doing … the gesture!
Towards that inlaid quest, to see light and touch it, but even beyond that, to hold it and to bring it back, perhaps with a hope to redeem us, we who seldom live and have grown accustomed to darkness. Blind to the memory of art and light.
I espied him many times balanced there in a secret, that deep dark privacy into which a moment of perfect consonance with his genius had snatched him and how disfigured he had become!
Wilbert the joke, the actor, the clown, the sh_t our descriptions are vagrant and fail to attend that solitude which flagellates the soul of the artist in its quest for form and how this sensuosity confuses us and bring to bare our love-hate retaliation for his daring to achieve the perfect air that our chaos must deny and revel in.
Where the artist seeks that gesture, that note on which body and soul and idea ride. That line of precision, the line of a single step and purpose, its lengthening, its longing for fulfillment, e.g., understanding and articulation, that cohesiveness of word and action, whence his death-bed cry came: I love, I love, God knows I love!
But only eternity can hear him, for longing is eternal, and his gesture is towards the eternal. And we who are dead in this dead place are further cheated until we see him dead and just a bit higher in death.
He is where we want him to be, his struggle is finally muted and safely requiemed with fake and pomp. His presence eludes the froth of our vain postmortems, there is no room in the funeral, even beyond the end, the artist, who is preferred as a memory, is cowered by philistinism - this performance is already sold out.