Ti Jean and His Brothers by Derek Walcott is one of the most celebrated plays in Caribbean drama. After many years as a foremost play around the region, written by a poet-playwright who was a Nobel Prize winner, this drama is now being performed in Guyana. It is a production of the National Drama Company directed by Al Creighton and Subraj Singh. Production manager is Tashandra Inniss.
The play is set for the National Cultural Centre with 3 matinee performances on April 3, 4 and 8 which start at 1 pm each day and an evening performance on Saturday, April 6. The play is one of the prescribed texts for CXC study and the matinees are being specially mounted for the benefit of secondary school students who are preparing for the CSEC exams this year.
Ti Jean and His Brothers is a post-colonial play that draws on many traditions, most prominent among them being Caribbean folklore and culture, Christianity, mythology, Greek theatre and the story-telling tradition. Among its post-colonial qualities are its allegorical pretensions. Significantly, Walcott used the formula of the fable – the folk-tale structure and West Indian mythology to dramatise the Caribbean experience of colonialism and the struggles leading to liberation and independence.
There are themes of the triumph of good over evil in the story of how a young boy, Ti Jean, takes on a challenge from the Devil and uses his wits to defeat that formidable foe. There is symbolism in the way the planter, an important figure in West Indian history and colonisation, becomes a mask worn by the Devil in his schemes against mankind. The theme is worked out as well in the fable in which the animals of the forest become assets in this fight. The two brothers who, in their arrogance, insulted the animals and did not know how to treat them, failed, while the one who had enough sense to befriend them and win them as allies, had the qualities for success and triumphed over evil.
An outstanding factor in this upcoming production is the work of the National Drama Company (NDC). The styles and design of the production are in keeping with the orientation of the company towards theatrical innovation. This production of Ti Jean is post-modernist, trending towards avant-garde theatre. It uses a flexible set, making use of imagery, abstraction and modern techniques.
Going along with this is the deployment of dance and music, stylistic movement and chorus. The NDC applies choreography, mainly done by Esther Hamer, and music directed by Kimberly Samuels. Various musical instruments, including violin, drum and guitar enhance the drama and complete the production design. The musicians are Samuels, Lisa Adams and Ricardo Primo, while both the chorus and the lead actors/actresses utilise a considerable volume of dance movement.
The NDC was established in January 2015 and is an extension of the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama (NSTAD). It is made up of graduates and associates of the NSTAD and it functions as the professional arm of that institution. It carries out outreach activities such as a mentorship scheme and training through the annual summer workshops held by NSTAD, and administration of the National Drama Festival.
The members of the NDC are theatre enthusiasts who work in most of the areas of theatre and drama. They are writers, actors/actresses, dancers, singers, choreographers, musicians, stage managers, costume designers, makers of props, directors and producers.
They function in all those capacities in this production of Ti Jean. What is important is their interest in new forms and innovative theatre. A few of them are tutors at the NSTAD and are involved in exposing the students to post-modernism. The same interests and orientation inform the Ti Jean production and are very visible in the set, dance, music and costuming.
New theatrical forms have determined their productions including the most recent – Musings of A Poet, and plays done for Carifesta, including the post-colonial Masque, presented in 2017. Another function that they have, apart from exposing students and audiences to the newer forms of theatre, is that of drama in education. They have been involved in doing productions to assist the secondary schools in the plays they study for CXC. They provide opportunities for students and teachers to be exposed to live performances of the drama being studied. So far, the NDC has produced Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel directed by Ayanna Waddell and Nicholas Singh (2017) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest directed by Esther Hamer and Keron Bruce (2018).
This year it’s Ti Jean and His Brothers. In this play, Walcott draws from St Lucian folklore and the Caribbean storytelling tradition. The play is based on the myth of Ti Jean who is a folk hero and trickster figure, played in this production by Kemo Cort, who defeated the Devil, played by Mark Luke-Edwards, and was elevated by God to be “the man in the moon” providing light to guide the world. It includes other folk characters such as Papa Bois (played by Nicholas Singh), the keeper and protector of the forest whose identity the Devil assumes. This speaks to the fact that the Devil, or evil, can invade all parts of society and can appear in any form to deceive, mislead and destroy. The Bolom (Esther Hamer) is another folklore creature – the spirit of a baby who died at birth. Such spirits can be claimed by malevolence, thus in this play, it is a servant of the devil.
This borrowing from the folk and cultural forms extends to the mode of performance, in this case, the storytelling tradition. The plot of the play unfolds as a tale told by the frog (Tikoma Austin) to other animals as they gathered together to shelter from the rain. It is the story of a mother (Nicola Moonsammy) living in poverty with three sons – Gros Jean (Ackeem Joseph), Mi Jean (Keon Heywood) and Ti Jean. The Devil is a bit tired of his lonely life of immortality after being cast out of heaven by God and wishes to experience human emotions. He therefore challenges the brothers to a contest to see if they could cause him to feel emotions. In this contest, whoever gets angry first will lose. If the Devil loses, he promises a reward of gold, but if any of the brothers gets angry, he is eaten.
In this plot, Walcott presents the Devil as a kind of tragic figure, who appears almost human, in his nostalgia for his exalted life as a great prince in heaven, and a desire to experience the emotions of mortality. It even appears that there is sympathy for him as a tragic hero. Walcott seems to challenge Christianity. The family in poverty is “forgotten” by God; the Devil “owns half the world” – it is “hard to distinguish” him from God; he is “the creator” of human vices and pleasures. Otherwise, the play draws from Christian mythology.
This tragic hero is a borrowing from Greek drama. Walcott owes other debts to the classics in this play. There is a chorus of animals, led by the frog, and including Firefly (Sonia Yarde), Cricket (O’Neilka Bacchus), and Bird (Nirmala Narine). This reflects the use of animal choruses by Greek playwrights (eg Aristophanes) as this drama draws from the classical tradition as well as the Caribbean.
The other characters in the play are included because of the post-modern design – such as the demons attendant upon the Devil, the walls of the Mother’s hut, the cane leaves and forest trees played by Ayanna Waddell, Kim Fernandes and Akbar Singh. Waddell is also the stage manager. Here, we have humans playing inanimate objects and acting as parts of the set. These are examples of the new dramatic forms attempted by the NDC in Ti Jean and His Brothers.
