Brilliant portrayal of changed roles THE ARTS Irving Wardle Twenty years ago Derek Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre; Workshop. " We began ", he says,- "with this malarial enervation: that no- thing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefoot backyards . the self-inflicted role -of the martyr came natur- ally." As a poet, dramatist. and practical theatre man, Walcott took on the task of recording "the anguish of the race ", and his 1972 play collection Dream on Monkev Mountain suggests the work of a West Indian Synge. To judge by Henry Muttoo's production of Pantomime at the Keskidee Centre, in Gifford Street, Islington, Walcott has eased up a good deal since those days. Here, on a lonelv golden beach, is a middle-aged white hotelier desperately rehearsing a one-man show to justify his brochure's promise of nightly entertainment. The show is Robinson Crusoe, in which he hopes to involve his reluctant manservant Jackson, to wvhom, as a bait, he offers the white role, wvith himself as a wvhite cannibal called Thursdav. Jaokson grudgingly cowrolies, tries out his employer's lines and improves on them, impro- vices Crusoe calypsos, and wYorks out a novel fate for Crusoe's parrot (" choked by prejudice"). The tourist sho-w is still far from complete at the end of the evening, but by then the two men have formed a bond, and w-orked their way through every conceivable meaning of the word "panto- mime ". ., The play is a brilliantly extended set of variations on the master-pnd-servint relation- ship, in which the two partners continually swvitch roles and show that it is often the ser- vant that enjoys higher s:atus: as wvlhere the haughty Jackson refuses to serve breakfast until the mas-er has put his trousers on. Their relaeionship is a pantomime of authoritv and subservience, but the harsh voices of the colonial past keep breaking through. When drunk the master resumes his authori- tarian bark and racial insults just as Jackson slips back into dumb insolence and takes his revenge Walcott calls the play " an entirely human drama between two people ", and this is what holds it on the rails. Their actual situation is extremely artificial and develops not through narrative but as if by stripping successive skins off an onion. But, as played by Lloyd Anderson and Eric Richard, the characters have enough indivi- dual vitality to survive the successive masquerades. Also, their routines amount to a life- saving game, alowing each side to act out their post-colonial aggressions without doing each other any damage. Walcott's master-stroke is to allow Jackson to come On wear- ing a photo-mask of the boss's estranged wife, thus releasing a flood of hatred against a dis- placed enemy. Thanks to the Keskidee group we are at last getting. an introduction to this fine writer. Brilliant portrayalI of changed roles : Keskidee Pantomime