Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre 1966 -2005

For more almost forty years, Jamaica’s Barn Theatre was a crucial part of the development of a Caribbean theatre that extended beyond the Europhile elite. When it began in 1965, there were scarcely any plays written by Caribbean playwrights to perform. By its presence The Barn encouraged the work of dramatists such as Dennis Scott, Ashani Harrison and Carmen Tipling, and above all the work of Trevor Rhone, with whom Yvonne Brewster enjoyed a close if sometimes tumultuous theatrical relationship. Yvonne Brewster's splendid retelling of the making of the Barn captures the phenomenon of youthful ambition, creative optimism and rollicking intellectual excitement that characterized the spirit of young people fired with the zeal of imagining a postcolonial self as distinct from a colonized self. The men and women who started the Barn were shaped by Jamaica’s independence or the idea of it, though their spirit was as much shaped by the giddy youth culture of the sixties blossoming in London, where some were trained, as by developments in Jamaica where ska, reggae and Rasta were coming together in a not always lucid mix to create a sense of possibility. As much as it is an invaluable record of the plays performed in the context of a changing Jamaican society, Vaulting Ambition is an engaging and affectionate account of the sometimes larger than life personalities who were involved and the often difficult material circumstances in which theatre was made. Above all, the memoir gives us the inimitable voice of Yvonne Brewster, raconteur extraordinaire.

About the Author :
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne Brewster, OBE, is a director, actor, teacher and writer. She co-founded the acclaimed Black British theatre company Talawa in the UK and in 1965 she also jointly founded (with Trevor Rhone) The Barn in Kingston, Jamaica's first professional theatre company. She was awarded an Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts in 1993, and in 2001 she was granted an honorary Doctorate from the Open University. In 2005, the University of London's Central School of Speech and Drama conferred an honorary fellowship on Brewster in acknowledgment of her involvement in the development of British theatre. In 2004 she published The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (Arcadia Books). She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's For the Reckord (Oberon Books, 2010)and Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, published by Oberon Books in 2012.