For the Reckord
Page 18
ANNIE: Have you heard from Cupid?
SAMMY: You put Cupid in danger, milady, and you are not safe. You should go back to England.
ANNIE: (Repeats.) Have you heard of Cupid.
SAMMY: Cupid is dead.
ANNIE: (Racing upstairs.) He is not dead!
SAMMY: The rebels shot him for whitemindedness.
ANNIE: Abuku, come and help me find Cupid.
ANNIE runs into her bedroom to get her shoes and LUCINDA hangs onto them.
LUCINDA: It’s not safe out there. If he’s alive, he’ll come here.
ABUKU: (To ANNIE.) Is he alive?
ANNIE: Yes.
LUCINDA: You trust your vision?
ANNIE: Vision comes like a dying ghost.
ABUKU: Will he come?
ANNIE: (Sobbing.) He won’t leave me, Lucinda, will he?
ABUKU: You put him in danger.
ANNIE: He doesn’t care if I’m white, he doesn’t think I’m a whore, he knows the politics are deranged, he isn’t a blind creature of his time, passing down tried and tested lies.
LUCINDA: Can you see Cupid alive?
ANNIE: The rebels didn’t kill him. It was the militia that stood him up to be shot for a traitor, the gun flashed in the pan, and he fled.
LUCINDA: You weren’t wrong about Herrera.
HERRERA, his body beautifully together, glows in the room. ANNIE spreads a table with a magnificent devil’s cloth, like an altar, lit with candles. ABUKU and LUCINDA chant as they all shed their clothes. Talking-drums in the distance.
ANNIE: What are the talking-drums saying?
LUCINDA: Princess, Princess.
ABUKU: They crucify the body.
LUCINDA: And save the christian soul.
ABUKU: They work our bodies to death…
LUCINDA: Making useless silver and sugar and gold.
ABUKU: Our joys are fleeting.
LUCINDA: And our sixth sense is dead.
ANNIE: Oh Satan, fallen angel of joy, fallen angel of love. Restore love to heaven.
LUCINDA: Restore joy to heaven.
ANNIE: God a virgin, Christ a virgin, and virgin the mother of God. Kiss the mountain of shame.
They ritually kiss each others’ mons, chanting.
ALL: (Chanting.) I see the body of Christ, neither sinful nor crucified.
From the darkness outside comes PALMER’s deranged voice, talking to a safe-nigger.
PALMER: I burn a fever. Send in the doctor.
SAFE-NIGGER: He’s not here sir.
PALMER: Send him in.
PALMER enters the drawing-room. ABUKU pads in with a flask of rum. PALMER wheels round.
PALMER: (Screaming.) Wear shoes!
ABUKU puts the rum on the table.
Where is Dawes?
ABUKU: Dead sir.
PALMER: Milady?
ABUKU: Upstairs sir.
PALMER starts to bolt, hears dogs’ feet padding around and dogs growling. He’s afraid to go out into the dark. He fires, emptying his gun. ANNIE appears at the top of the stairs.
ANNIE: If you can shoot them, they can’t be real.
PALMER: I don’t know what is fear and what is real. I know Cupid is gone. He ran out of breath.
ANNIE: Fever won’t kill you. You’ll blow your brains out and they’ll toss you into the shit-pit. That’s the way I saw you die the day I married you.
PALMER: Chloe will look after me. (Shouts.) Chloe. Chloe!
ANNIE: Chloe’s in the slave-gang.
PALMER: My father bought and sold ‘em all his life and died laughin’ in bed. A tighter fist you never met. Always laughin’ and totally joyless. There’s peace in England and thrift. We’ll heal our quarrel in England…
If you breed.
A son, yes.
ANNIE sees CUPID standing in the door.
ANNIE: (To PALMER.) You have a son right here in the house.
PALMER: You had my son! Where is my son?
ANNIE: I pray I am breeding for Cupid, and our love-child shall live.
PALMER, his mind going, hears an imaginary bugle.
PALMER: You hear the bugle. They’ve caught another rebel. When it blow again they will cut him. The road will be safe, I can go now. I am weak with fever and some fear, and harmless vapours seem real. The world of silver and sugar and gold seems absurd, but it is my world, ruled by a jealous brute with a gun. I’ll blow my brains out to prove they’re there. I am a scientific man. Don’t be alarmed.
He exits. We hear two shots.
SLAVES: (Off, in the distance.) Burn the cane, bakkra mad, burn the cane!
ABUKU: (Entering.) The army is coming.
CUPID: Where are they?
ABUKU: When they’ve stopped drinkin’ and whorin’ they’ll come, and we’ll piss on their corpses. (Exit.)
ANNIE: The murder ends, my lovely Cupid. We’re both hanging and swing gently in the wind, out of our foolish bodies, at home in the shades. Go to Africa to see the God and give him the news, that our best hope was our neighbours got slaughtered, not us.
They look at each other.
End.
EPILOGUE
Meetings with Barry Reckord
The year was 1971. I was in the first term of my first year at drama school. A notice goes up on the information board offering free tickets to students to attend that evening’s performance of a new play at the Roundhouse theatre in Chalk Farm. Being new to drama school, new to London, and hungry for experience of theatre I took up the offer. What I saw that evening was a play called Skyvers. The play was written by a man called Barry Reckord, and directed by Pam Brighton. I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the theatre. I knew nothing of the writer or director, or the faintest idea what the title might be referring to. Anyway what I got was a riveting indictment of the English education and class system told through the experience of teachers and pupils of a dead-end comprehensive school. The play’s theme was education, or more accurately the lack of education and the blighting effect that has. I left the theatre in a state of excitement and shock. Excitement because I’d just watched a dramatization of my feelings. The actors on stage seemed to be feeling the same anger and resentment I was feeling, saying the things I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I didn’t have the means, and that was shocking, because it meant I had bumped up against someone who I didn’t know, never met, but who knew me well enough to explain me on a stage. I suppose it could be said that that was my first encounter with Barry Reckord, and it would be several years before we would actually meet.
Barry Reckord and I met for the first time at the BBC Pebble Mill Television studios in Birmingham. We had gathered to do the ‘read through’ of Barry’s television play, Club Havana, part of the second city first series. Everyone who would be involved in the production was present in the room, actors, the director, producers, designers, and some of the film crew, and of course the writer Barry Reckord a little round man in black rimmed glasses, who sat away from everyone in a corner of the room with his head in his hands; a posture he maintained throughout the reading of his play. As we came to the end of the reading his posture changed. He lifted his head; there was a huge grin on his face. He threw his arms wide as if to embrace the whole room, he let out a great gust of laughter, and then said to the whole room ‘O God! I’m so happy! You made my play sound the way I wanted it to (pause) that’s never happened to me before.’ Followed by more laughter from Barry. He seemed to be a man with a huge capacity for joy, which he freely expressed to everyone that came within his orbit.
Over the few weeks we rehearsed and filmed Barry’s play I suppose what I saw, and sadly, what I have never seen since, though we both tried, was Barry in harmony, professionally and intellectually within the world he had chosen to express his deeply felt beliefs. His belief as expressed in this piece was that education, a proper education, was the liberating force that freed us from the tyrannies that made us destructive to each other and ourselves. The piece was completed to everyone’s satisfa
ction, and Barry and I embarked on what was for me a remarkable train journey from Birmingham to London, and I believe it was this journey that was the foundation for my friendship with Barry Reckord. As the train sped back to London, back home for both of us, and in my mind that’s an important factor, Barry and I began to reveal ourselves to each other, or rather he got me to reveal myself to him. I had never before met someone of his age who showed such fascination in what someone my age might think, and feel, and aspire too. And he did it with such delicacy, enthusiasm, warmth and encouragement that what became clear was his love, and interest in the young. What he also did on that journey was exchange my thoughts, feelings, for his experience, and how his experience had brought him to where he was at this moment as we headed for home. There seemed to be key incidents in his life, that he carried with him, and had honed down to its essences, so as to demonstrate how unnecessarily brutish life could be. He believed there was another way, which he subtly tried to give you a glimpse of, for you to take or leave as you saw fit. He did this with such zest and good humour, that it became apparent what a brilliant teacher he might have been, and I was glad that I had the good fortune to spend that time with him.
Our meetings by necessity or design became less frequent, but for me always memorable. They would go something like this; out of the blue I would get a phone call from Barry demanding that I come for lunch, because, and I quote, ‘I am simply longing to see you.’ I duly obliged when I could. Who could refuse such a gracious offer? The lunch in the beginning was always at his home, a flat he shared with the indomitable Diana Athill; whenever I suggested that we might go out to lunch, his riposte was why spend money on something he could do perfectly well, and he could and did – Barry was a generous host. There was always plenty of meat. Barry loved his meat. We would eat, sometimes with Diana, sometimes not, then he would light his pipe, pour himself a whiskey, stretch out on a comfortable surface like a well-fed cat, and so begin his inquiry. How was I? How was the world treating me, and so on? He was always eager to hear how other people were getting on in the world; whether battles were being won or lost. For him that was no longer the question. He had made up his mind about what was important, and if the world disagreed then so be it, there would be no compromise, and he lived accordingly. He wrote what he wanted to in the full knowledge that it would more than likely be rejected, but somehow that never dimmed his enthusiasm; he was never bitter or pessimistic, and when occasionally he showed me what he’d been writing I would see what brilliant perceptions he was capable of, but if that meant straying from his preoccupations he simply lost interest. That is the man, and I admire and respect him for it.
The most surprising meeting I had with Barry was in Weston-Super-Mare. Surprising because Weston as it’s known to the locals is a rather sleepy typical English seaside town full of retired gentle folk pottering around waiting to die, and the last place on earth I expected to run into Barry Reckord. I was there on tour with a play called Driving Miss Daisy playing the part of the chauffeur, whose raison d’être was to make sure his employer, a cantankerous elderly white woman got to where ever she needed to be safely. For those who don’t know, the play is set in America’s Deep South, over a twenty-year period before and during the civil rights struggle. The sort of play I imagined Barry would hate, but he didn’t. He found it utterly fascinating in the same way an entomologist, having stumbled on a hitherto undiscovered species of bug might. His analysis of the play made me laugh for a long time.
Another meeting with Barry Reckord that stays in the mind was running into him on Primrose Hill in the Regent’s Park area of London. We were headed in opposite directions, but collided on the brow of the hill. After a few moments contemplating the marvellous view of London that was afforded from where we stood, Barry began his forensic enquiry into just how was I doing personally, and then the question he left till last: did I have work and what was it? I told him yes I did have work, and at the moment I was playing Macbeth in Macbeth. Barely pausing for breath Barry retorted, it’s a rotten plot, Shakespeare couldn’t really do plots. I said, but the words are good! Barry’s response was, ‘sometimes, but not as good as Keats.’ As if to prove his point he recited some Keats for me. Beautiful, but to my mind inconclusive. We agreed to disagree, and headed off in our different directions. As I walked away from Barry I realized what it was I loved about him, and would always treasure. Put simply – it was his irreverence. Nothing was beyond question, everything, whatever it was, for its own sake, and ours, needed to be tested from time to time. Barry lived his life in that fashion. He is entirely sui generis. Much Love, Don.
Don Warrington
Barry Reckord: Biography
Barry Reckord was born in Jamaica on 19th November 1926, and went to Britain in the 1950s to study at Cambridge University as an Issa scholar. His first play Della (1953) under the title Flesh to a Tiger was produced at the Royal Court in 1958. He wrote several more plays for the Royal Court in the late 1950s and early 1960s including You In Your Small Corner (1961), Skyvers (1963, 1971) and X (1974). In 1962 Reckord adapted You in Your Small Corner for the Independent Television Play of The Week series. He wrote two more television dramas for the BBC: In The Beautiful Caribbean broadcast on the 3rd February 1972 and Club Havana transmitted on the 25th October 1975. In 1973 he was awarded a Jamaican Silver Musgrave Medal for his contribution to playwriting and was made a Fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the same year. His treatise on Cuba and its Revolution, Does Fidel Eat More Than Your Father? Cuban Opinion was published in 1971 (London: Deutsch; New York: Prager).
List of works:
Theatre
1953
Della
Ward Theatre, Kingston, Jamaica
1954
Adella
London fringe
1956
Miss Unusual
Jamaica
1958
Flesh to a Tiger (Della)
Royal Court Theatre, London
1960
You in Your Small Corner
Cheltenham
1961
You in Your Small Corner
Royal Court Theatre, London Arts Theatre, London
1962
You in Your Small Corner
Ward Theatre, Kingston, Jamaica
1963
Skyvers
Royal Court Theatre, London
1963
I Man (title of Skyvers in Jamaica)
Jamaica
1968
Skyvers
Nottingham Playhouse
1968
You in Your Small Corner
Arts Lecture Theatre, UWI, Kingston Jamaica
1969
Don’t Gas the Blacks
Open Space Theatre, London
1970
A Liberated Woman
New Arts Lecture Theatre at the UWI Kingston, Jamaica November 28
1970
June Fishing
Jamaica
1971
A Liberated Woman
Royal Court Theatre, London
1971
A Liberated Woman
La Mama, New York, March 17
1971
Skyvers (revival)
Royal Court Theatre Upstairs
1971
Skyvers
Roundhouse, London
1972
In the Beautiful Caribbean
Ward Theatre Kingston, Jamaica. April 22nd
1973
Let it All Hang Out, Daddy
Lecture Theatre, University of the West Indies Kingston, Jamaica, December
1973
Give the Gaffers Time to Love You
Sunday reading, Royal Court Theatre, May 18
1974
X (Let It All Hang Out Daddy)
Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court Theatre, London
1975
The White Witch of Rose Hall
Creative Arts Centre, Kingston, Jamaica, October
; 1978
The White Witch of Rose Hall
Creative Arts Centre, Kingston, Jamaica
1979
The Family Bed (reworking of X)
unproduced
1980
Joshua versus Spiderman1
Jamaica
1981
Skyvers amateur production
London (YAT)
1982
Streetwise (musical adaptation of Skyvers)
London/Bristol
1985
White Witch
Rehearsed reading, Tricycle Theatre, London
1988
Let It All Hang Out Daddy (or X)
Kingston
1988
Sugar D
Barn Theatre, Kingston
2006
Skyvers (50 rehearsed readings series)
Royal Court January 23rd
Adaptations
1989
Beverly Hills Call Girl (from both the Ladies and Gentlemen & The Balloons in the Black Bag by William Donaldson) – produced and directed by Barry Reckord. July 21. New Kingston Theatre.
Plays for Television
TV Play of the Week
Granada
You in Your Small Corner (1962) single TV drama
Play for Today
BBC
In the Beautiful Caribbean (1972) single TV drama
Second City Firsts
BBC
Club Havana (1975) single TV drama
1 Reworking of In the Beautiful Caribbean. Also known as ...Michael
Notes on Contributors
DIANA ATHILL was born in Norfolk in 1917 and educated at home until she was fourteen. She read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and graduated in 1939. She spent the war years working at the BBC Overseas Service in the News Information Department. After the war she met Andre Deutsch and fell into publishing. She worked as an editor, first at Allan Wingate and then at Andre Deutsch, until her retirement at the age of 75 in 1993. Her books include An Unavoidable Delay, After a Funeral, Make Believe, Instead of a Letter, Don’t Look at Me Like That, Stet (her memoir of fifty years in publishing) and most recently Somewhere Towards the End, winner of the 2008 Costa Prize for Biography.