Crichton
Michael Reckord, Contributor
TEACHER AND theatre practitioner Jane Crichton loves both her professions. By day, she teaches English Language, Literature and Drama at Montego Bay High School and by night - most nights anyway - she is involved in theatre. Here her roles are really varied.
A member of the Management Committee of the Montego Bay Little Theatre Movement (MLTM) and de facto secretary, she has operated Front of House as a member of the backstage crew (including Wardrobe Mistress) and, more substantively, as actress and/or director in some 17 MLTM productions since 1975.
That was the year the MLTM, the most prolific of Jamaica's theatre producers, staged its inaugural show, three one- act plays. Crichton acted and directed in that production and has been 'hooked' on theatre ever since.
IT'S A LIFE
Of teaching, Crichton says: "It's not a job. It's a life. I can't leave it." (Actually, she will retire from her current school later this year, but will continue teaching privately).
Then of theatre, she says: "Theatre, and the arts generally, is the only thing that will save the world. We have got to value it more."
She adds that in Jamaica, generally, "We think of the Almighty dollar too much. We give audiences what we think they want. We have got to help achieve balance."
She believes the MLTM does give audiences a balanced fare. The company's theatrical menu for the year does suggest she is right. Their 2003 list of productions reads as follows:
Two 4 One, the current production, soon to play in Kingston, is a heavy, adults-only drama; Children, Children (May-June) is a family-oriented revue; Man Better Man is a musical; a Theatrical Artistic Performers (T.A.P.) Season is slated for August; Dangerous Obsession (September) is a psychological drama and One of Our Sons is Missing (December) is about a man with AIDS.
The year closes with a T.A.P. Christmas Production. How is that for variety?
Crichton's feelings for the Fairfield theatre and property run deep. In her poem Fairfield, she recalls how "through interminable summers as a teenager" she climbed trees on the property and dreamed of the future. A stanza relating to her later life and acting career reads:
Here I first found friends, those who thought like me.
Here I escaped a broken life and learned to live many lives
In splintered fragments.
Here I found myself by becoming other people
For two hours at a time. Crichton's interest in theatre began in school, at St. Hilda's and later Montego Bay High School. There she enjoyed acting and performed, she says, in Shaw and Coward works, among others.
DRAMA GROUP
Later still, at the University of Western Ontario, she joined the institution's drama group and continued acting. On her return to Jamaica, she started teaching at Cornwall College (CC) "just to help out, for a term," she recalls, laughing for her love for teaching developed from there.
At CC, she discovered she has a talent for directing and entered her boys in Schools Drama Festival plays. At about that time, apparently impressed with what he heard about her, fellow Montegonian actor/director Paul Methuen invited her to take part in the first MLTM production.
Although she enjoyed the experience, Crichton left Montego Bay three years later, first for a short teaching stint in Mandeville then for England, where she remained for the next 15 years. While there, she taught and joined a drama group in Dorset but did very little drama with the group, whose 'condescending' attitude she found off-putting.
In England, she got married (again) but "was not allowed to do theatre." So it was back to Jamaica in 1994.
Immediately on her return, the then MLTM member and current Chairman Douglas Prout telephoned her to inform her that she was the company's new secretary.
If Crichton raised any objections to the way the post was thrust upon her, she did not mention them in the interview - not surprisingly, for her 'Fairfield' poem ends:
This place is mine.
This magic place is mine.
I think.
Or am I owned by it?
