The theatre community and theatre audience have been peering out from behind their curtains throughout 2022, looking closely and cautiously at the post-COVID recovery of theatre on the Guyanese stage. This long-awaited return seems to have taken shape slowly and the situation may now be rated as fairly normal.
But the judgement was quite decisively made from the point of view of the popular audience with the recent performance of the stage play Those People, a presentation of Signature Productions. Very high credits will go to Maria Benschop, who was responsible for this, working as usual in partnership with Lyndon Jones and the team that has produced the stand-up comedy show Uncensored and the stage farce series Nothing to Laugh About. Those productions cornered the market and assumed command of the popular theatre before the intervention of the pandemic shut down.
Those People was a comedy well received by a large audience and proved a decided crowd favourite among current local stage plays. It was a bit untidy, without much production polish, with long black-outs and a script in want of editing to reduce unnecessary length and enhance neatness. But without any doubt it was a very satisfying play, often hilarious, always quite well performed by the cast all-round, and a success with character types.
In this plot, two very close friends, Beyonce and Toya, have a major falling out when a strange young lady (Marissa Morgan Bonie) comes running for help and rescue from a dangerously abusive husband. Against the strong advice from Beyonce, Toya takes her in for shelter and protection, but her continued, seemingly permanent stay leads to a major quarrel between the two friends, who ‘stop talking’ to each other.
At the same time in the house next door, a husband given to philandering in extra-marital affairs with various women, faces a dilemma when his home is invaded by one of his ‘exes’, which drives his angry wife away. This was a kind of parallel sub-plot very tangentally related to the main plot and really in need of editing for neatness in dramatic connectedness and completion. It turns out the ex-girlfriend has drugged him to gain mysterious control, but her trick is found out, she is evicted and the wife happily returns.
Similarly, it turns out Toya’s own mysterious guest is a dangerous adversary; an ‘ex’ of Toya’s present boyfriend seeking vengeance. She masterminds the situation, invokes an obeah charm and takes advantage of the estrangement between Toya and Beyonce to set about murdering her hostess. But as she is slowly dying, Toya is dramatically rescued by Beyonce, their friend Noreen and another character, named Overdose.
The play was a mixture of popular farce, with remarkably hilarious sharp dialogue and witty punch-lines worthy of high farce, and other dramatic types. It drifted into mystery, horror, suspense and even social commentary, in a middle that dragged a bit, losing its sharp sting. However, all is recovered since it ends up decidedly as a comedy with a happy ending with “all’s well that ends well” off the order of the popular Roots Theatre. This is quite a plus for the play, since it exhibited focus on a type of popular theatre originated in Jamaica that has been gaining ground around the Caribbean. Hints of it has been seen in the works of Mike James and of the Conquerors Drama Group of Parika. Benschop makes use of the type in the way the plot turns out to be the discovery and dramatic foiling at the end of a criminal scheme that had gone quite undetected. This cloak and dagger undercurrent hides behind a great deal of farce and buffoonery which makes sense when the under-cover detective work comes to light. In this play, it is the mechanisms of Beyonce and Noreen to rescue their endangered friend.
However, above all, the play had a considerable advantage. This accounted for the immediate and ready acceptance of the performance by the audience. This was because the characters and their dramatic situation were already well known to the majority of people in the National Cultural Centre. Those People is also a ‘soap opera’ or ‘sit-com’ which has been running for perhaps three years on local Guyanese television. The characters were already popular favourites among a large audience familiar with the comedy series on TV.
Beyonce and his friends and the actors/actresses who play them have become household words in Guyana because they have caught the imagination of the TV audiences. Beyonce (Michael Ignatius) is a transvestite who has adopted a female personality and, to the delight of the audience, has created the appellation “grand-person” which he insists he must be called instead of “grandson”. His best friend Toya (Clemencio Godette) has pretensions to intelligence which accounts for her pronounced malapropisms, performed as usual, to audience acclamation. Their friend Noreen (Leza Singh) has her own pretensions to high class and breeding which she hilariously imitates in her speech and mannerisms. Overdose (Shontel McLean) has earned her sobriquet from her constant state of drug addiction, while Stacie (Abigail Brower) is the ghetto girl. Other players such as Marissa Morgan Bonie and Germain Grimmond were brought in for the play.
These characters are well-defined representatives of contemporary society created and very well played in the comic soap opera. Ignatius, over the existence of the TV series, is one of the most recognisable characters in public life. On stage, he quite became his character in a studied performance. He was also well versed in the element of ‘talk back’ – interplays and cross-banter with heckling audience members, which is a feature of Roots Theatre. The same can be said of Godette, who seems to have developed a successful niche for herself in playing character roles – a skill seen in a number of other plays and certainly outstanding in this one. Yet, when she had to play pathos she was equal to the task.
Leza Singh as Noreen was excellent. She is an extraordinary talent who left the audience in awe with a memorable performance. What makes her exceptional among characters on the Guyanese stage is her ability to become her selected character and live the role to the last inch. She remained in character right through the intermission appearance when prizes were given out to members of the audience, convincing everyone it was Noreen and not Singh who was performing that function. She mastered the art of ‘talk back’ and as an accomplished comedienne moved seamlessly from scripted dialogue into ‘ex-tempo’ exchanges with the audience.
The creation of Those People on TV will go down as a coup for Benschop along with Jones and their team. Here was a case of taking advantage of the lock-down conditions enforced by COVID-19 when nothing could be done face-to-face on stage. Drama was created for television home viewing and a group of funny characters in their situation of social realism emerged as a kind of carpe diem. Benschop herself has come a long way since her first efforts with Nothing to Laugh About, learning from and addressing errors and providing the willing audience with comic drama.
Where Those People was concerned, it took a little time after a rollicking beginning for a few confusing elements to fall into place. But although those familiar with the television version took added delight in it, anyone who had never seen it did not lose anything and could eventually follow the comedy.
