The Theatre Guild of Guyana staged a Festival of Plays at the Playhouse in Kingston last week-end in which four new plays and playwrights were presented. That was a revival of this kind of activity at the Guild and an avenue for the creation of new work, as well as for the development of different skills in theatre production, and to help the institution to honour its commitments to an audience. It also revealed interesting confirmation of a trend in the Guyanese stage.
There are records in the history of this theatre that it has been a place and an initiator for the hosting of drama festivals. This was a high point in the national theatre during the 1960s when there were competitions among one-act plays with prizes awarded for the best productions and performances. The groups then would perform plays available to them from different parts of the world or West Indian plays mostly made available because of the collection and publication of the University College of the West Indies (UCWI), later UWI Extra Mural series for which Errol Hill was largely responsible.
During that time Guyanese drama was still a work under construction and had not yet generated any large volume of local plays. In fact, the Guild itself was playing a role in that development. There was a playwriting competition and, both in and out of that competition, members of the Guild were