By Michael Reckord, Contributor
Musician Don Drummond whose life is portrayed in Professor Kwame Dawes' 'The Valley Prince'. - File
THE DON Drummond story is one of music, passion and hardship, one of madness and murder. Practically a ready-made drama, it has been lying in bits and pieces for years in newspapers files, record libraries and the memories of musicians and music lovers, just waiting for someone to pull it together.
Now someone has.
He is poet/playwright/musician/literature professor Kwame Dawes, and the work, The Valley Prince, was given an exciting reading at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (PSCCA) on Sunday. One in the series of end-of-the-month readings organised by the PSCCA's drama tutor, Brian Heap, it was directed by Carol Lawes.
The actors, who got so much into their roles that one frequently forgot they were reading, included Mark Danvers (as Drummond), Marsha Ann Haye (Margarita, the rhumba dancer Drummond loves), Amina Blackwood-Meeks (Drummond's mother) and Hilary Nicholson (the nun who narrates much of the tale). They played the main characters.
In supporting roles were Jerry Benzwick (the reporter who interviews the nun), and Neto Meeks, Alwyn Scott, Livingston White and Kingsley Stewart, who all played several roles. This multiple casting is suggested by the author in his notes to the play.
The notes go on to state that the 'set should be minimalist and representational', and this was indeed the type of setting designed for the reading. Boxes, classroom chairs and a step platform represented desk, bed, music studio and a cricket pavilion, among other things, and spotlights mentally moved the audience about in time and space in true theatre style.
At the same time, as per the author's instructions, the play shifts around "as a cinematic piece should". There are so many shifts that it is probable that Dawes had a movie in mind when he was writing.
The Valley Prince should make an excellent stage play. It could be even more interesting as a motion picture.
It ranges over a 15-year period, from the sixties to the eighties, and also shifts from Jamaica to Canada; a movie could show the different styles of dress and grooming of the periods and countries. There is scope for a powerful sound track. Just consider the Jamaican music of the era - the ska, the rock steady, the reggae and the emerging dancehall.
A counterpoint to the main story of Drummond's tortured, eventful life is provided by commentaries on various test matches which the West Indies played over the period which, in a play, would probably be aural but which could be easily portrayed visually in a movie. (Actually, the cricket background is the weakest aspect of the play and a movie producer might well leave it out).
Arguably, however, a stage production could best capture the ethos of a Greek tragedy which the playwright is striving for. From the very beginning, a sense of doom hangs over the story. Drummond is mad; the gods are out to destroy him. (Whom the gods would destroy, the saying goes, they first make mad).
The content of the story is not the only element which presages a tragic end. The structure does, too. Dawes has the reporter interviewing the nun about lives that have already ended and the characters earlier referred to as supporting often comment on the play like a Greek chorus.
And, like the audience to a Greek tragedy, the audience on Sunday felt a sense of helplessness as we watched Drummond, one of our musical geniuses, a man once regarded as 'the second best trombonist in the world', treading the road to destruction. Couldn't he see that the foul-mouthed, erratic, promiscuous brown beauty Margarita wasn't good for him? Couldn't he see that some of his friends were involved in criminality? Couldn't he see that smoking ganja was bad for him?
Though still 'a work in progress', this play holds tremendous promise.
