Traditional Enactments of Trinidad: Towards a Third Theatre

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Gibbons' version of a third theatre is an exciting, insightful, very well informed and thoroughly researched analysis of national theatre in Trinidad and the West Indies. This study takes us from its origins with roots in the 'First Theatre' - traditional enactments that evolved in slavery and indentureship, through a colonial era of domination and resistance, influenced by the 'Second Theatre' - the imported western performance on the formal stage, to what emerged in the twentieth century. Revealing definitions and analyses of modern Caribbean society by Rex Nettleford in the ground-breaking Mirror, Mirror, and Stuart Hall, for instance, opened the doors for scholarship in Caribbean studies. In this context Errol Hill, Derek Walcott and Dennis Scott have been standouts where theatre is concerned. But Gibbons offers new light through a fiercely postcolonial lens with deep sensitivity to the proletarian consciousness that is at the root of this concept of Trinidadian and Caribbean theatre. - Al Creighton Jr., University of Guyana