DEVINDRA DOOKIE
DEATH OF AN ACTOR - DOOKIE'S FINAL ACT
By Raymond Ramcharitar
Express
December 15, 2001
Page 7
It's not at all ironic that Dev Dookie's last significant words should be directed to Albert Laveau the artistic director of the Trinidad Theatre workshop, on three sheets of unlined legal paper, handwritten on both sides.
It started "Albert; By now, I'm probably making a torrid debut with the Pitchfork Players in Dante's "Inferno", or directing Faustus and Mephistopheles in a "hot" Marlowe revival."
I know the sense of humour, but I didn't know Dookie that well, and I'm sure that in the next few days tributes will pour in from various quarters that tell everything there is to tell about the man.
My first meeting with him was random and bizarre: in the late 1980s when we did a Crix ad together: the one where two refugees were complaining about waiting for deportation but took heart in their vital supplies.
After that, in my professional life, what I did know, though, was Dookie as character, as actor, and as incorrigible rumshop critic. I did not see much of his work: I'm told he was hot in the 70s in Walcott's plays, like "Branch of the Blue Nile", and I saw him in one or two farces in the early 1990s, "Run For Your Wife"; and a Neil Simon thing. He hadn't done much work in the last few years, but I did see him in one play which struck me as an important piece when I saw it.
The play was "Sakharam Binder", by Bengali playwright, Vijay Tendulkar, and it ran about eight years ago at the Little Carib. It was a brutal piece of work about a man who scoured the rural villages of his province in India looking for abandoned wives whom he would offer a place in his home, and the use of whom he would take in exchange.
I remember Dookie, bilious and sweating on the stage, laying down the rules of his Miltonesque domain - it was a place he owned and where his authority alone mattered; whoever was there was there by his leave.
The play didn't do well; the tarnished view of the saintly homeland was just too much for a tribe of local Indians, and Dookie told me afterward that the tribe had done everything in their power to shut him down. He lost money on it, and I remember for years after, he tried to get it staged elsewhere, but couldn't get it off the ground.
He worked with the Information Division in those days, after he'd returned from a drama scholarship in India in the early 1990s, and Sakharam Binder was just one of the things he tried to do to get the theatre thing going. Nothing seemed to work out; he could never seem to get it going; there was that "Flight of the Ibis" movie thing, but that amounted to nothing.
I lost track of him for a few years, then early this year, ran into him a few times around the Savannah; he lived in a flat on the Belmont side, and would sit under the trees on evenings. On those occasions, he was always talky, almost desperately so. About his version of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night", whose full sexually deviant potential had never, he said, been done in Trinidad, or anywhere else. Or other things.
He talked about how hard it was to get anything going, how much he hated his job, how he planned to sell his car and retire to an aunt's house in the country for a few months. I suppose but for the proximity to his death, this would really mean nothing.
The last few months were bad: he had been in jail, in St Ann's for psychiatric observation - the bad bits outweighed the good. In these months, Albert Laveau and the TTW were his steadfast friends, perhaps he had more, I don't know.
But now, Dookie's done for. I don't know quite how to end this: what I knew of his life, to my unfamiliar examination, seemed to take the pattern from the brightest part of it that I knew: seeing him on-stage as Sakharam Binder. A man, ruthless, weak, as kindhearted as his circumstances would allow, just a man, but doing what few men would do: facing the world as the brightest angel had faced his maker, and claiming his place in it.
His final words to Laveau were: "Can Up Close and Personal" help with my cremation? I'm not only broken but broke." Broke, but not boring.
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O FOR A DRAUGHT OF HEMLOCK!
Actor Devindra Dookie delivered his final performance in a handwritten five-page letter addressed to Albert Laveau, artistic director of the Trinidad and Tobago Theatre Workshop.
The letter, full of literary references, is quite lucid, with an absence of self-pity and taking almost a delight in the rich experiences he has enjoyed as an actor.
He starts off by listing writers who had committed suicide - Hemingway, Sylvia Platt. "O for a draught of hemlock?", he asks with a sense of the theatrical.
In it, Dookie attempts to describe the elusive quality of the actor saying, "It's easy to say I went mad. And I did. It's easy to blame any number of circumstances or combinations thereof. But even though Derek believes the only role I can play is myself (and he is right) somehow some actors, like myself, must act or go mad."
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JAMES LEE WAH: IT'S THE STATE OF THE ARTS
By Terry Joseph
Founder of the San Fernando Arts Council, Drama Guild and the city's Theatre Workshop, James lee Wah is blaming the state of theatre (and the arts in general) for the death of stage and screen actor Devindra Dookie.
Lee Wah, who also served as Head of Naparima College's English department, yesterday said Dookie was trapped in a situation that afforded him no release.
"He was a great talent, a brilliant actor with lovely voice and articulation, passion and charisma, but there was no place for him to express these attributes," Lee Wah said. "He must have found it really difficult to survive in a climate so terribly hostile to the arts and therefore made his exit.
"His greatest tragedy may have been the absence of a national theatre. Having founded the Alternative National Theatre, he still had the problem of finding outlets for his work and you could see him wasting away.
"But it is a tragedy for us all," Lee Wah said. "His loss symbolises the state of theatre in Trinidad and Tobago. Most of us who have survived in theatre could only do so as a result of constantly fighting battles on all sides. For some, the pile up of frustrations may be too much to bear. "It must be a different kind of agony to see one's life withering away and not being able to do anything about it. That is the real tragedy. The society had no place for him and it put him out without any remorse," Lee Wah said.