T he Last of the Redmen by Michael Gilkes will take its place, with The Legend of Kaieteur and Miriamy, at the summit of Guyanese cultural achievement on the stage.
Its creator, its sole begetter, its mastermind and its tour de force, one-man performer, Michael Gilkes, proving himself again in this work one of Guyana and the Caribbean’s leading creative minds, is well on his way to fashioning for us a masterpiece.
I say it like that because I believe The Last of the Redmen is a great play still in the process of creation. I sense that in this play Michael Gilkes is working towards a perfection he feels he has not quite grasped.
I saw the very first performance of Redmen in the Ballet Room of Woodbine House, the old Taitt family home, now Cara Lodge, in Georgetown. That was a highlight in a long life of watching theatre. The hair along my arms and at the nape of my neck rose up as it does when I encounter a great poem for the first time: the spirit struck by wonder instructs the body to react with a shiver.
The performance I saw later in Toronto, sponsored by the Bishop’s High School and Queen’s College Alumni Associations, confirmed the greatness of this play in another country before another audience which it closely touched. It was differently staged, brilliantly so by Ken Corsbie, and the original performance was interestingly changed up, particularly in its second part. I believe that Michael Gilkes is searching for a more perfect continuation and ending to follow the already perfect first part of the play. It remains a magnificent work-in-progress.
We are being shown the inner life and tragic death of Guyana’s middle class – cultivated, humane, honourable, creative and deeply aware culturally. Michael Gilkes captures the sense and soul, as well as the fun-loving happiness, of this memorable group vividly and quite unforgettably in the first part of the play. This narration, the wonderful words and the body language of an old, dying and defiant stalwart of his class of yesteryear, is a masterpiece of Guyanese and Caribbean theatre.
What happened to this astonishingly lively and alive group and why, the play must then go on to resolve and this is where I get the feeling that its creator is still searching for the most convincing intellectual as well as theatrical denouement possible. He is striving to do justice to the loss of a whole way of life and find in the depths of himself the reason why such richness faded and died.
How can he in this rare and difficult one-man dramatic masterclass account for the doom which befalls those who so confidently bestrode their world? How is he to make this as real and as transfixing as the account he gives of the “redmen” in their ascendancy?
In the showing of Redmen in Toronto we were privileged to see one of our great Caribbean artists not only perform memorably in an exceptionally well-staged production, but also observe him take a further step towards creating one of our most memorable works of art.