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Mustapha Matura

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Mustapha Matura
Photo: Francine Lawrence
Photo: Francine Lawrence
BornNoel Mathura
(1939-12-17)17 December 1939
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Died29 October 2019(2019-10-29) (aged 79)
OccupationPlaywright
LanguageEnglish
Notable worksPlay Mas; Rum and Coca Cola; Welcome Home Jacko; Playboy of the West Indies
SpouseIngrid Selberg
Website
mustaphamatura.com

Mustapha Matura (17 December 1939 – 29 October 2019)[1][2] was a Trinidadian playwright living in London. Characterised by critic Michael Billington as "a pioneering black playwright who opened the doors for his successors", Matura was the first British-based dramatist of colour to have a play in London's West End, with Play Mas in 1974.[3] He was described by the New Statesman as "the most perceptive and humane of Black dramatists writing in Britain."[4]

Career

Born Noel Mathura in Port of Spain, Trinidad,[3] he changed his name when he became a writer, and explained: "I liked the sound of it.... It was the sixties."[5]

Leaving the Caribbean, he travelled to England by ship in 1962, and after a year working as a hospital porter he and fellow Trinidadian Horace Ové went to Rome, where he worked on stage productions such as Langston Hughes' Shakespeare in Harlem.[5] Matura thereafter decided to write plays about the West Indian experience in London.[4]

Matura's play As Time Goes By was first performed in 1971 at the Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh and in London at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, with a cast of Caribbean actors, including Stefan Kalipha, Alfred Fagon, Mona Hammond and Corinne Skinner-Carter. Play Mas was first performed at the Royal Court in 1974 (with Stefan Kalipha, Rudolph Walker, Norman Beaton and Mona Hammond in the cast), winning Matura the London Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright Award that year. It would be revived in 2015 at the Orange Tree Theatre, directed by Paulette Randall in what was described by The Guardian as a "beautifully observed production... a richly informative play that raises big questions about the nature of liberation, and is also hilariously precise about the shifting balance of power."[6]

Among Matura's subsequent plays were Rum and Coca Cola (1976), Another Tuesday (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1978), More, More (The Factory, London, 1978), Independence (1979), A Dying Business (Riverside Studios, 1980); One Rule (Riverside Studios, 1981), Meetings (1981),[7] Playboy of the West Indies (Oxford Playhouse, 1984; produced for BBC television, 1985), Trinidad Sisters (Tricycle Theatre, 1988) and The Coup (Royal National Theatre, 1991).[8][9]

In 1978, he co-founded the Black Theatre Co-operative (now NitroBeat) together with British director Charlie Hanson.[4] "Frustrated by the lack of interest from London Fringe theatres in Matura's new play Welcome Home Jacko, Matura and Hanson set up their own theatre company. Welcome Home Jacko was presented at The Factory in Paddington, west London, in May 1979 and marked the beginnings of the Black Theatre Co-operative. The company supported, commissioned and produced work by black writers in Britain."[9]

Matura's work for television includes the Channel 4 sitcom No Problem! (1983–85), written by him with Farrukh Dhondy, and Black Silk (BBC, 1985), which he devised in collaboration with Rudy Narayan.[10]

Matura was also a poet, and in Bayswater, West London, in 1971 he performed his epic poem "Elae Elae Ghanga", and featured in an evening of poetry and music on Friday, 29 October, organised by the Caribbean Artists Movement, along with James Berry, T-Bone Wilson, Louis Marriott, Marc Matthews and Archie Markham.[11][12]

Personal life

He was married to Ingrid Selberg, daughter of Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg.[13]

Matura died aged 79 on 29 October 2019, following a heart attack.[3]

Selected works

Bibliography

  • Matura: Six Plays: "As Time Goes By", "Nice", "Play Mas", "Independence", "Welcome Home Jacko" and "Meetings", Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0413660701
  • Three Sisters. After Chekhov, London: Oberon Books, 2006, ISBN 978-1840026436
  • Playboy of the West Indies, Broadway Play Publishing Inc., 1989, ISBN 978-0881450606. London: Oberon Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1840029246
  • Moon Jump (illus. J. Gifford), Heinemann Young Books, 1988, ISBN 978-0434949441
  • Meetings, New York: Samuel French, 1982, ISBN 978-0573618642
  • Nice, Rum an' Coca Cola & Welcome Home Jacko: Three Plays, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980, ISBN 978-0413477200
  • As Time Goes By, London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1972, ISBN 978-0714508832

Contributor

  • The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers, 2011

Awards

Mustapha Matura received a number of awards throughout his career, in the UK and in Trinidad.

References

  1. ^ "Mustapha Matura", The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre. Oxford Reference.
  2. ^ Giverny Masso, "Playwright Mustapha Matura dies aged 79", The Stage, 30 October 2019.
  3. ^ a b c Michael Billington, "Mustapha Matura obituary", The Guardian, 1 November 2019.
  4. ^ a b c "Matura, Mustapha (1939–)", Screenonline.
  5. ^ a b Biography, Mustapha Matura website.
  6. ^ "Play Mas – Quotes + Reviews", Orange Tree Theatre.
  7. ^ Mel Gussow, "Stage: Mustapha Matura's 'Meetings'", The New York Times, 31 March 1981.
  8. ^ Mustapha Matura page at Bloomsbury Publishing.
  9. ^ a b Black Plays Archive, National Theatre.
  10. ^ TV, Mustapha Matura website.
  11. ^ Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972, London: New Beacon Books, 1992, pp. 293, 298.
  12. ^ Ian Dieffenthaller, Snow on Sugarcane: The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Britain, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, p. 103.
  13. ^ Atle Selberg biography, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
  14. ^ "Plays directed by Roland Rees", Unfinished Histories.
  15. ^ Oberon Books: Playboy of the West Indies by Mustapha Matura. Archived 2014-03-15 at the Wayback Machine Based on J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
  16. ^ The New York Times Theater Reviews, 1920– Volume 21, p. 153, 1971: "Next to the intensity of 'Death and the Maiden' and the breadth of 'Brothers and Sisters,' Mustapha Matura's new play, 'The Coup,' at the National, seems small in scale. It is a satiric comedy about the limits of revolution. Mr. Matura can be a ..."

Further reading

  • "'Ter Speak in yer mudder tongue': An interview with playwright Mustapha Matura" in Kwesi Owusu (ed.), Black British Culture & Society, Routledge, 2000.
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