Reckord - For the Reckord: a collection of three plays by Barry Reckord

FOR THE RECKORD

A COLLECTION OF THREE PLAYS BY BARRY RECKORD

Edited by Yvonne Brewster

With contributions from Diana Athill, Pam Brighton, Mervyn Morris and Don Warrington

OBERON BOOKS
LONDON

This collection first published in 2010 by Oberon Books Ltd
Electronic edition published in 2012

Oberon Books Ltd 521
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Flesh to a Tiger copyright 1958 Barry Reckord
Skyvers first published by Penguin in 1966 in New English Dramatists Volume
9. Copyright 1966 Barry Reckord
White Witch copyright 1985 Barry Reckord

Individual contributions copyright the contributors 2010

Barry Reckord is hereby identified as author of these plays in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.

All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Margaret Reckord Bernal; . No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the authors prior written consent.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-053-1
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-704-2

Cover design by James Illman.

Cover image: Poster by Colin Garland for the Jamaica National Theatre Trust 1972 production of In the Beautiful Caribbean by Barry Reckord. Courtesy of Lloyd Reckord.

Printed, bound and converted in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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Dedicated to Lloyd Reckord

PROLOGUE
Diana Athill

INTRODUCTION
Yvonne Brewster

SKYVERS: AN APPRECIATION
Pam Brighton

Introduction to WHITE WITCH
Mervyn Morris

EPILOGUE
Don Warrington

In 1960, when I first met Barry Reckord, his second play, You in Your Small Corner, was about to open at Londons Royal Court Theatre. It seems, alas, that no copy of that play survives. Being about a young Jamaicans first year in England, it was closer to his personal experience than anything else he wrote, and its run at the Court was impressive. Later it was produced again at Londons Arts Theatre, but with less success owing to a bad piece of miscasting. To my mind it was the most strikingly witty of his plays.

That is the lovely quality of his writing: not the kind of wit that produces smart word-play, but wittiness in the way things are observed. Barry was never a joke-maker, but he was always acutely aware of what was absurd or comic about life, which gave his dialogue a lot of sparkle. In the same way, the elegance of his style was the kind which results in precision, rather than in a prose which is decorative or poetic (something which he hated). He used to say that if you could take a word out of a sentence and substitute another one without changing the sentences meaning, then both those words were redundant an observation to which my own writing owes much. And this liveliness and grace of style was united with great sensitivity to moral issues, as is so powerfully demonstrated in what I think was the most admired of his plays, Skyvers.

It was a piece of dreadful bad luck that turned the tide of his rising reputation. White Witch, a marvellous play, was taken up by a producer who had enjoyed one big success in London with a play which transferred to Broadway; and Broadway was where she decided that Witch should open, so off Barry went to New York and glory. A director had already been picked, a cast chosen and no sooner had they met for the first read-through than it became apparent that the producers other play was a disastrous flop. So disastrous was it that the poor womans career as a producer ended then and there. And Barry came home.

After that set-back, bravely though he endured it, it seemed to me that Barrys passion for ideas for their own sake began to eclipse his interest in the making of plays and a play which exists primarily for the propagation of an idea, as his increasingly did, leaves producers cold. Gradually, therefore, the play-going public lost sight of him. But the long diminuendo with which his writing career ended most certainly ought not to annul the fact that Barry Reckord wrote four outstanding plays, and the present fact that this book brings three of them back into circulation should give great pleasure to everyone interested in serious theatre.

Diana Athill

Why a collection of early plays from Barry Reckord? His place in the history of black playwriting in the United Kingdom goes almost unrecognised. This is unfortunate. Reckord was among the first modern Caribbean playwrights to have work produced in England, in a period when black writing was being discovered there. In fact a claim might even be made that he was the first of this small band to enter the scene, if one takes into account a small fringe production of his first play Della, or Adella under which title it was staged by his brother Lloyd in London in 1954.

It was at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square where the majority of Caribbean playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s found a home. In 1956 Trinidadian Errol John won The Observer playwriting prize with his first play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl which was produced there, in 1957. This was followed in 1958 by Reckords Flesh to a Tiger, directed by Tony Richardson and designed by Loudon Sainthill. In 1960 You in Your Small Corner, written while Reckord was still a student at Cambridge, was produced by the Royal Court, directed by John Bird and produced by Michael Codron, transferring to the Arts Theatre in Londons West End. It was subsequently adapted for Television by Reckord, and was aired by Granada TV on the 5th June 1962. In 1963 his third and best known play Skyvers was presented, once again at the Court, directed by Anne Jellicoe. These successes in the 1960s were followed in the 1970s by a stage production of a new play A Liberated Woman adapted for television by Reckord, directed by Phillip Saville, leading to another BBC Television commission Club Havana, produced by Peter Ansorge and aired in 1975.

No scripts of Reckords impressive body of work are readily available. They should be. My initial thought was to pull together four of the early plays. You in Your Small Corner would have been one of those but no copy has been found. The search for the texts has been challenging. Many incomplete manuscripts exist. Complete scripts were harder to come across. Finding the prompt copy of