As Guyana steadily steps up the pace towards Carifesta X, the nation presented one of its vintage acts in a very appropriate and significant setting. GEMS Theatre Productions, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, presented Dave Martins – Lemme Tell You at the Theatre Guild in “A Pre-Carifesta Event.”
It was a significant national feature for many reasons. It marked the 32nd production by the very prolific GEMS Theatre, the nation’s leading theatre company, incorporated in 2002. It was staged under the management of the nation’s most accomplished theatre production and stage manager, Gem Madhoo-Nascimento, who is one of the famous graduates of the Theatre Guild. Following the private launching, this production was the first public performance at the re-constructed Playhouse since the rebirth of the Guild in June, 2008.
Like so many others, Madhoo-Nascimento had her first training in theatre in the Guild’s informal programme and, significantly, many of the trainees in the current Carifesta Training Programme in Technical Theatre had their first assignment on the professional stage in Dave Martins – Lemme Tell You. This therefore lent strength to the overall theme of rebirth associated with this production. It was the first official pre-Carifesta event in the theatre, celebrating the rebirth of the Playhouse as a training institution through an event that was a precursor to the regional festival on its return to the place of its birth, and featuring a return to his native land by a legendary Guyanese performer.
Dave Martins is one of Guyana’s foremost exports in the world of entertainment who, after Eddy Grant, went on to become a legend. He gained acclaim in his first discipline, music, as leader, lead singer and song writer for the Tradewinds, a four-man band started in 1967, first based in Canada and then in the Cayman Islands. It was very much a Caribbean band with a distinctive sound that swept across and out of the region much like the strong, impactful meteorological phenomenon from which it took its name. Just like that Atlantic windforce as well, it was enduring, sustaining popular interest during its period of significant longevity.
Tradewinds songs are predominantly focused on Carib-bean life, on the Caribbean experience, manners, culture and idiosyncracies. Martins is a satirist, thus a main preoccupation in the compositions was with sharp commentary or description of the peculiarities of lifestyles, attitudes, pastimes and traditions. The music owes its popularity largely to humour and wit as it contains many familiar comic situations and stories. As a song-writer, Martins may be the equivalent in style, orientation and content, of such literary humourists as Sam Selvon.
In the theatre Martins developed a career as a playwright, scriptwriter for a satirical revue and a performer of stand-up comedy. As a Guyanese practitioner he belongs to a noble tradition based on the form, tenor and focus of his work. In that particular tradition Guyana has had the famous Dem Two with Marc Matthews and Ken Corsbie, who later formed All A We with the addition of Henry Moottoo, John Agard, Eddie Hooper and Cammo Williams. Agard migrated to England and to a successful career as a performance poet; Moottoo to Jamaica and then Cayman. Moottoo achieved outstanding accomplishment as a set designer and was, among other things, a tutor at the Jamaica School of Drama, while Matthews has continued as a performer and a poet, also doing performance poetry in the UK.
Martins’ excursion onto the stage has been after that fashion of performance on the trail blazed by Dem Two and Corsbie, a close associate of Martins. He has written two musical plays, Raise Up, produced in Guyana by the Theatre Company and All in One which was sponsored by GT&T and performed for Guyana’s Independence celebrations. GEMS Theatre tells us that since settling in the Cayman Islands in 1982, “Dave has widened his horizons in recent years as the sole writer and cast member of an annual comedy revue at the Harquail Theatre in Grand Cayman. For close to 10 years now, on stages in the Caribbean and North America, Dave has also become known for his solo stand-up comedy performances rooted in the culture of the Caribbean. This combination of his unique contributions of a musical icon and a naturally comedic mind is winning new audiences…”
It was to this happy combination of a long standing performance tradition in the manner of Corsbie, decades of accomplishment as a musician/singer, the effective craft of a lifetime career as an entertainer, together with this relatively new stage routine, that the Theatre Guild audiences were either introduced or re-united. Dave Martins satisfied two demands. The largest section of the audience looked for nostalgia.
Yet there were those familiar with his old work who might have been interested in finding out what else he could do. These would have formed an alliance with those who had no familiarity on which to hitch their expectations, who wanted something new, or who would have heard of this celebrated musical personality but had never really seen him.
Nostalgia has been a part of Martins’ repertoire for a very long time, some of his favourite themes feed it, and he has tailored much of his performance to that particular demand. In fact, it is one of his strengths and an important factor in the name that he has built for himself. However, the acclaimed Tradewinds leader seems to have fashioned a fresh niche for himself with his current brand of stagecraft which depends on this combination of the new and the familiar. He was therefore equal to all those potentially competing demands and turned possibly contesting forces into fluent and well crafted teamwork.
He is thoroughly at home in the storytelling tradition but he was also comfortable and assured as a stand-up comic commentator and satirist. His material took several long and engaging strolls down Memory Lane since its street-side facades and what is hidden behind them are the stuff on which he draws very heavily. Out of this reservoir he revitalises several tales of old Georgetown and the Guyana of the past, satirising the behaviour, culture, manners and peculiarities of Caribbean society that have not changed. It was never difficult for him to speak to the present since his links are usually seamless and fluid.
The manner of Martins’ presentation of this material also helps in the effectiveness of these various combinations. During the run of his comments and narratives, his songs become either choric comments or topical items, both enhancing anecdotes or providing occasions for their illustrative use. He seems to have wisely chosen not to perform whole songs as if he was giving a concert, but to weave them into the comedy routine to rewarding effect.
Laughter is, of course, the main ingredient much as it is the main device. Like other leading performers in the tradition of storytelling and comic relief like Paul Keens Douglas or Ken Corsbie, Martins is able to sustain social criticism and provide information. He is a celebrant of Caribbean cultural customs and exalts it even while playing on its weaknesses. This zeal to celebrate it, however, has led to one or two inaccurate pronouncements about language.
Martins declares that Guyanese Creolese and Caribbean Creoles are colourful, unique languages which capture concepts and are able to express them with amazing clarity and economy. All of that is very true.
But he then proceeds to assert that, like its counterparts in the Caribbean, Creolese is a superior language, with abilities and expressive skills not possessed by other languages, in particular, Standard English. Here is where he gets into trouble.
The notion is that the Creole is more creative, expressive, colourful and dramatic than the standard language. However, that is not the case according to the way all languages function. Any language that is the first language (mother tongue) of its speakers is as efficient as another; there is no better or superior language. A Creolese speaker may be far more effective, expressive and dramatic in his use of Creolese to convey meaning, concept and nuance than he would be in English, but English can serve its native speakers just as efficiently.
Martins also says that West Indians tend to be somewhat ashamed of their language and believe that they should suppress it in favour of Standard English. All of that is true. But he goes on to assert that this reticence about Creoles has stultified the writing of plays in Creole languages in the Caribbean. Here, again, is where he gets into trouble. This has been the norm since the 1970s. A state of the art computer may be a bit challenged to count the number of plays written in Jamaican ‘patois’ over the past 30 years. Trinidad is not so far behind and Guyanese playwrights got into the act by 1990.
In keeping with the theme of training and development, Dave Martins shared the stage in Lemme Tell You with some of Guyana’s current and emerging comedians. Kirk Jardine will make it in stand-up comedy. He will be even better after a little more experience and acquisition of technique. Then he will not be quite so self-conscious and apologetic and will not provide so many explanations. He may also reduce his generous repertoire of anal jokes. Tiffany Hytmiah is a teenager with obvious talent, confidence, a potential for performance quality and few inhibitions. She is, understandably, an apprentice and will no doubt learn to edit her material judiciously and develop some variety in her use of the stage.
GEMS Theatre does well in allowing this new generation to emerge and gain experience. The storytelling and comedic tradition represented by such legendary veterans as Corsbie and Matthews has a future after all.
The Dem Two and All A We theatre is somewhat different from the routines of Keens Douglas, Oliver Samuels, Bello and Blacka and their forms, but they are both strong traditions. Not only do we see evidence that fresh talent will emerge, but we are also assured that refreshing theatre is also being carved out of these established forms by already seasoned veterans.
Dave Martins has threaded the theatre of the recent past and the future together in an unassuming comedy routine that goes deeper than it appears on the Guyanese stage.
