THE MAN IN THE
CORNER HOUSE
Story by Simon Lee
Sunday Guardian
December 19, 1999
Page 13
It's one of those biting cold November mornings in London that makes
you want to helicopter to Heathrow and storm a seat on the first plane heading
back to the Tropics. This is the
climate that forged the character of Empire builders and gave them a permanent
stiff upper frost bitten lip. An
insipid sky, the colour of dirty washing up water, trails over the skeletal
trees of Queen's Park.
This
northwestern suburb of the metropolis has been elevated by successive tides of
property booms, which periodically sweep the capital. Its solid Edwardian semi-detacheds are now the homes of
successful professionals, media types, even artists and writers. I stop at a corner house on the western
flank of the park. It's larger than its
neighbours but bears the same stamp of solid respectability. When I knock, the door is answered not by an
anaemic Brit but by a sardonically smiling Belmont boy. Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura
ushers me into a kitchen whose walls are lined with brightly painted Italian
pottery. We climb the stairs to his
attic writing room. It's no garret and
Matura hardly looks like he's starving.
The room is spacious, book lined; there are two skylights with blinds to
keep that fierce northern sun at bay; a single bed (for inspired all night
sessions?) and a play script on the computer combine to give the space a
tangible atmosphere of focused energy.
Matura
has a dramatist's ear for inflammatory dialogue but beneath the ol' talk are
genuine concerns and there's a personal element in the discourse too: "I'm a Trinidadian, my plays are about
Trinidad. I've sent the TTW a complete
collection of my plays but I've never heard from them. They're not interested in doing my
plays."
He
pauses, extrapolating from memory; "Strange that Trinidad doesn't have the
cultural awareness of Jamaica (with its vibrant theatre). But they don't have carnival. In my day when you played a character, you
assumed a role. It gave you
transcendence from your daily life. You
could be a hero, a king, a winner. Now
that's changed with the skimpy costumes; there's no theatre apart from
Minshall."
Carnival,
for him is not enough however: "We need a theatre about Trinidad and the
Caribbean experience so we can see reflections of our past, present and
future." He posits that culture is
just as relevant in terms of being a Caribbean leader as the economy. "If Trinidad is going to lead and we've
got the money and the brains, we have to lead culturally as well."
Matura
has spent most of his life in Britain but retains the inflections and
mannerisms of his Belmont youth. Born
in 1939 he attended Belmont Intermediate School. His scholastic career was undistinguished: "I was below
average, under-motivated. I wanted to
leave school."
He
got his break when his father died and he became the family breadwinner. A succession of jobs provided him with an
overview of society no sociology degree could have. First he was an office boy for an attorney. Then he did a stint at the Hotel Normandie
before becoming a casual worker on the docks.
Meanwhile like so many of his generation constrained by the narrow
confines of island life, he escaped in the movies. "I was really into James Dean. I wanted to get into acting and made plans to go to the States
and act."
Instead
he went to England in 1961. He and
aspiring filmmaker and fellow Trini Horace Ove worked as porters in the
National Temperance Hospital. Then they
went to Rome where they got hired for a film about building a railway. Rome gave Matura his first taste of working
in theatre. He worked as stage manager
at Teatro Goldoni, the city's only English speaking theatre. It also provided him with his first
experience of Black Theatre, a production of Langston Hughes' "Shakespeare
in Harlem" which the playwright attended.
Back
in England, he married an English girl and began writing, he took "an
undemanding factory job" while he wrote his first effort Black Pieces
which did well enough in Amsterdam to decide him "This is the life for
me" and he abandoned the factory for full time writing.
His
first plays 'about West Indian immigrants in England' were groundbreaking for
British theatre. Although the Oxford
educated Jamaican Bary Record was exploring the same theses, Matura's approach
was rootsy to Record's educated version.
"He was an Oxford boy writing from an Oxford perspective. I was writing from a Wong Chong bridge,
Belmont perspective."
Returning
to Trinidad for the first time in 12 years in 1973, he gathered material for
'Play Mas' an examination of the effects of independence seen through the lives
of an Indian tailor and his mother. He
then began 'exploring and examining the different layers and levels of Trinidadian
society" in plays like Independence, Rum and Coca Cola and The
Coup.
All
of Matura's work even his adaptations - Playboy of the West Indies
(based on JM Synge's Playboy of the Western World) and Sisters (a
Trini reworking of Chekhov's classic) are based in Trinidad. For him, like other Caribbean emigrant
writers of the post war generations, (Selvon, Naipaul, Mittleholzer, Lamming)
the UK nurtured their literary careers while their island homes provided raw
material and inspiration.
"Living
in the UK and writing about Trinidad, that's the perfect distance and the
safest way," says Matura. There
are regrets: "If I lived in Trinidad I'd write much more, there's so much
material just in casual conversations."
But he's only too aware of the struggle of earning a living as a writer
in Trinidad. "Why doesn't the
Ministry of Culture have a scheme for aspiring writers?" he queries with
the ingenuousness of those who don't live here.