By Ian McDonald
Pay a visit to the corner lot at Parade and Cowan Streets as soon as you can. Here the new Theatre Guild Playhouse was opened last night in revelry and enthusiasm marking the culmination of an astonishing Guyanese self-help effort. The new Playhouse is very much the possession of all Guyanese. Too much that we do is now for now and nothing for hereafter – but this is an achievement in an entirely different category. Guyanese have come together to create something valuable for the coming generations. May this new Playhouse, brought into being through a remarkable exhibition of Guyanese cooperation and spirit, become once more a famous landmark, a home in which the performing arts can flourish and reach out to all, a centre for creative work well into the future.
This project has seen Guyana at her very, very best. It is a national endeavour which Guyanese of every persuasion, across the widest possible spectrum of interest and conviction, have wholeheartedly contributed in an extraordinary and sustained act of cooperation. The new Playhouse is a symbol of a nation at one with itself. If this can be done why not so much else? This makes us proud, this serves as an inspiring example.
It started as a worthy, but modest, plan to rehabilitate the derelict home of the old Theatre Guild at an estimated cost of G$11 million. Then on waves of enthusiasm and gathering support the project grew by stages into full-scale renovation, expansion and modernization of the old building and installation of all the equipment needed for a small theatre matching any in the Caribbean. The value in cash and kind involved in this labour of love and the imagination, including the expert consultation and professional time and supervision freely given, has amounted in the end, amazingly, to G$100 million.
At the start who would ever have thought that such a summit might be climbed? There has been nothing in the domain of private and public subscription which equals this. It has not been one or two great patrons who have brought all this about. It has been a multitude of benefactors – corporate, individual, governmental, diplomatic and in the Guyanese diaspora – who have contributed. Corporate Guyana has distinguished itself, coming to the rescue time and time again when funds were running desperately low. Government and its agencies have been very willing to lend substantial support at important times. Canada, outstanding among helpful friends from abroad, rallied around the project. As for individuals, “they know this good thing they have done and that is reward enough.” Let one name stand for the very many because he was ubiquitous in his advice, skill, creativity, optimism, humour in adversity and abounding energy: Bert Carter, consulting engineer and chief architect of the new Playhouse enterprise, giving his expertise and time freely, as all have done, for love of what was being attempted.
The original Theatre Guild, inaugurated in January 1958, and the old Playhouse, opened in July, 1960, generated a remarkable vitality in the world of theatre in Guyana in the years leading up to Independence and beyond. It was a period of theatrical flowering which stands out in the cultural history of Guyana. One of the Guild’s basic aims was “To encourage the development of the theatre in all its aspects in Guyana” and this it did in full measure in those exciting days. Not only were productions staged in rich profusion by an unusually talented and dedicated group, but workshops and training courses were initiated to unearth new talent, drama festivals and play-writing competitions organized, a dance troupe formed. It was a heady time and theatre became a part of education as well as entertainment in the nation. The list of theatrical Hall of Famers nurtured in the old Guild is long and distinguished in Guyana and far abroad: Frank Pilgrim, Sheik Sadeek, Francis Quamina Farrier, Ken Corsbie, Marc Mathews, Henry Mootoo, Clairmonte Taitt, Wilbert Holder, Michael Gilkes, Robert Narain, Eugene Williams, Ian Valz, Ron Robinson, Margaret Lawrence, Gem Madhoo, to mention by no means all who learned and practised their art and craft in the old Guild.
This extraordinary renovation was hard enough to achieve. But now comes the harder part. The practical energy and inspirational thrust of the old Theatre Guild must be recaptured. Of course it is a different age, with commercial considerations more prominent, but the love of theatre for its own sake and for the sake of educating and inspiring young Guyanese of all persuasions in the arts and aptitudes of the theatre must still be the great objective. The new Playhouse must gradually but certainly become a hive of activity – plays produced, newcomers recruited and taught, workshops held, schools encouraged to attend, a venue offered for competitions and festivals, a centre for advice and instruction. The membership drive, the organization, the financing, the daily grind of administration and upkeep will not be easy but it is what must be properly done to sustain and develop this reborn home of theatre in Guyana.
In the writing of WB Yeats there is an eloquent phrase: “a country bound together by imaginative possessions.” Yeats used the phrase in the context of discussing the importance of a National Theatre for his beloved Ireland. Yeats also wrote in this context that it was impossible to exist if there were “no national institutions to reverence, no national success to admire without a model of it in the mind of the people.” Let the new Playhouse in time become such a model in our own land. Derek Walcott said it well after judging the National Drama Festival at the Theatre Guild in 1965: “I saw a vision of one people united in a common interest pacing themselves to excellence.”
