( L - R ) Terri Salmon and King Yellowman - Contributed

Hugh Schultz, Contributor

Jamaican DJ Yellowman is reputed to have said to a crowd at a reggae concert "unoo want slackness or culture?" The crowd replied 'slackness', thereby marking a watershed event in the history of reggae music, where artiste and the public turned their backs on culturally uplifting music and the DJ took precedence over singers.

Somewhere along the line, Jamaican theatre must have gone through a similar turning point as Blue Mountain Theatre seems absolutely committed to bringing us theatre that is crude, lewd and an insult to the theatre of bygone days. Their latest offering, Deportee, shows that despite building up a mass theatre audience here in the United Kingdom (U.K.) they have no intention of feeding their audience with anything than a series of crudely stitched together sketches with a generous lashing of sexual titillation.

A discernible story

So what was so bad about the play? Well, first, a play needs to have a discernible story with a clear line of development, linear, circular or otherwise.

Deportee is a series of disconnected scenes that have little bearing on the previous scene and do not allow for serious exploration of the main characters. Simply put, each scene seems to exist for the sole purpose of allowing the writer, director to throw in as much sexual titillation as possible, a quick route to laughter, but a poor substitute for genuine entertainment.

Many of the basic components of good theatre were ignored. The set, for instance, was unimaginative and often irrelevant; the backdrop of a church building in the first airport detention scene is one example of such irrelevance.

A basic rule in directing a play is not allowing actors' position on stage to block or mask the view of other actors, yet at one point it seemed actors were being allowed to mask each other at will. The images created onstage using the relative positions of actors' bodies to each other and the set were uninteresting and told little of the emotional tale each character was experiencing.

There was some relief in the acting, however. Terri Salmon put in a convincing performance as the manipulative and deceptive mother, showing moments of subtlety and variation without resorting to overacting. Lavern Archer too had moments of calm control, her strong voice no doubt contributing to this. There is humour inherent in the language of Jamaicans and in the audience's recognition of these idiosyncrasies. This is one of Blue Mountain's strengths, the convincing use of language, though there is a tendency to overuse swearing for comic ends.

My viewing of Deportee wasn't helped by the fact that the same weekend, I reread Trevor Rhone's excellent Old Story Time, a play that deals with a poor Jamaican boy's struggle to make something of himself and his fight against colour prejudice in society and in his own family.

Similar themes

Deportee attempts similar themes when Miss G rejects her daughter's choice of a partner as being too black, but the writer handles this crudely and fails to develop this, so it eventually becomes a trivialised add on, submissive to the need to display as much sex in each scene as possible.

If Deportee is a symbol of Jamaican theatre, then it shows a parallel with the trajectory of reggae music where profanity and gun lyrics overshadow conscious lyrics; there seems to be no danger of us producing another Bob Marley, Third World or Burning Spear.

Blue Mountain Theatre seems to have relinquished its obligation to following basic rules of theatre, let alone producing something edifying, challenging or entertaining without relying on recurrent, crude sex allusions. Their plays are certainly not memorable as Rhone's Old Story Time 20 odd years after it was first produced.

The show was well attended, a testimony to Blue Mountain building a theatre audience here in the U.K. The question is, however, will we sacrifice culture at th of slackness and cheap popularity and tell our children that slackness is the new culture?

Deportee shows at the Broadway Theatre, Catford, until May 20.

Hugh Stultz is a graduate of the Edna Manley College in Jamaica and Goldsmiths' College and has done post-graduate research on Caribbean theatre