Osborne - Hidden gems. Vol. 2

T he Introduction to Hidden Gems (2008) foregrounded the unprecedented profile achieved by black British dramatists in the first decade of the 2000s seen in the proliferation of black-authored plays in London's mainstream and off-West End theatres. However, at the time of publication of Hidden Gems Volume II, this presence has tapered dramatically. In the second decade, fewer than ten plays per annum (as distinct from eleven in 2003 alone), have been staged in the same arena.of the subject from the inside, as he put it, necessarily had to provide the competence or savoir faire, as he also termed it, for dealing with this field (Shevtsova 2009: 83).

The staging of black British experiences and its uneasy relationship to a context which is predominantly white can claim what T.S. Eliot attributed as being the vital ingredient for any society's cultural health, a friction between its parts (Eliot 1949:126). Although the HMS Windrush had docked at Tilbury in the year preceding his definition, Eliot clearly confined this to English, Welsh, Scots and Irish cultures, discounting the constituent of race even as it became an increasingly prominent factor in mass migration from the ex-colonies, and despite his centrality in 1940s literary circles which included black Jamaican writer and broadcaster Una Marson. His model is bipartite, I now suggest that both class and region, by dividing the inhabitants of a country into two different kinds of groups will lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress (Eliot 1949:132) The friction between parts underpins the upending of notions of cultural homogeneity that were created by the post-war momentum of migration, settlement and indigeneity. It underpins the heritages and standpoints of the plays in Hidden Gems Volume II.

Resisting, rather than capitulating to conditions where staging whiteness is an invisibilised norm and staging blackness continues to be exceptional and noted, the writers in Hidden Gems Volume II reach out beyond local, regional and national parameters towards the receptive possibilities of a globalised slipstream via their individual artistic paths, and in the subject-matter they dramatize.temporality is not always reliant upon chronological ordering. The strategic use of anachrony seen in the analepsis and prolepsis of Courttia Newland's The Far Side or the in medias res of Paul Anthony Morris's Identity, can meld ghost story techniques with conventions of the courtroom drama, where retrievals of social history are intertwined with intimate domestic chronicles. These dramatists tailor traditions of city comedy, social realist, agit-prop and magic realist genres to represent the multi-cultural, trans-national and African diasporic inheritances that have emerged from a British-born context and creative development. Their plays offer recalibrations of history from black-centred perspectives and the multiple ways in which personal destinies have always been contoured by international politics and geographical mobility. The introductory commentaries to the plays are provided by people with insider knowledge of the subject-matter, and for whom the material provides a special resonance spanning the personal, political and aesthetic. With authorial profiles that embrace poetry, performance, song lyric, screenwriting and prose fiction, the seven dramatists in Hidden Gems Volume II create figures from the parvenu to the revenant, in settings from the battlefield to the playground. Their work is infused with the fruits of multiple expressive modes and literary-dramatic traditions, inviting further detailed critical attention beyond the scope of this book.