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By the time she founded her influential and still thriving Talawa theatre company in 1986, Yvonne Brewster, who has died aged 87, had made waves in her native Jamaica as an actor and director, worked on British TV versions of plays by Jimmy Cliff and her compatriot Trevor Rhone, run a small touring company, Carib, for black actors, and served for two years as a drama officer on the Arts Council.
She had good contacts and knew the ropes, and set about a dynamic programme of work – new plays and classics by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Shakespeare – often seen in the Tricycle (now the Kiln, in Kilburn), the Lyric Hammersmith and the Riverside Studios, all in London.
The Caribbean theatrical influx had been spearheaded by the playwright Mustapha Matura in the mid-1970s, and Talawa built on this foundation with such distinguished actors as Norman Beaton, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Mona Hammond and Stefan Kalipha.
Talawa – the word in Jamaican patois means gutsy and strong – operated alongside, and in occasional personnel overlap with, Jatinder Verma’s Tara Arts, the first British Asian company, formed by Verma in 1977. It, too, is still thriving.
Brewster achieved many “firsts” in Britain – the first black Arts Council officer, the first all-black production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (in 1989, starring an imperious Hammond as Lady Bracknell) and she was the first female black director at the National Theatre when, in 1991, she directed Lorca’s Blood Wedding, transplanted from Andalusia to Cuba, and gave a first big break to the late Helen McCrory as the bride.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne came from an upper middle-class family who ran a funeral business. Her Jewish Polish immigrant grandfather, Sam Isaacs, introduced her to Shakespeare, Ella Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens. Her mother, Kathleen, took over the family firm. Her father, Claude Clarke, who had Indian and Scottish antecedents, was a land surveyor.
Yvonne was educated at St Hilda’s girls’ school in Kingston. Determined to go into theatre – inspired by a 1954 performance in Kingston by Mona Chin (later, Hammond) of Sartre’s Huis Clos – she was enrolled by her father at Rose Bruford speech and drama college in what is now the London borough of Bexley, taking digs in Sidcup in 1956 as an intimidated 17-year-old. She was one of the first black drama students in the UK.
She moonlighted from Rose Bruford, where she was unhappy, to take dance and mime tuition – from Marcel Marceau, among others – at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1964 she returned to Kingston to teach drama and to establish (with Rhone) the Barn theatre, Jamaica’s first professional theatre company, in her family garage which, until then, housed four cars.
On her return to London in the early 1970s, she continued to cultivate her network of Caribbean and African artists in a British context and to work extensively in film, theatre and television.
She started to attract critical attention with two productions at the Tricycle, then run by Nicolas Kent. These were Rhone’s Two Can Play, a witty, vibrant comedy of Jamaican manners with Hammond and Rudolph Walker; and a terrific revival for the recently formed Black Theatre cooperative of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic A Raisin in the Sun, zooming in on a Chicago South Side family adjusting to ideas of emancipation and radical ideology.
Emboldened with financial support from Ken Livingstone’s doomed GLC she launched Talawa with co-founders Carmen Monroe, Hammond – great actors, both – and Inigo Espejel. The opening show at Riverside Studios in 1986 was CLR James’s The Black Jacobins, the story of how the revolt on the Caribbean island of San Domingo, a wealthy French colony, led to the independent state of Haiti.
Paul Robeson had played the role of the rebel leader Toussaint L’Ouverture 50 years earlier in London, but Beaton rescued this great role from obscurity in a tumultuous, landmark production by Brewster that established Talawa as a major player.
There followed 15 years of frenzied activity, sometimes in harness with regional repertory theatres such as the Liverpool Everyman or the Bristol Old Vic.
Particularly notable were Walcott’s O Babylon! (1988) – with a reggae-rock score by Galt MacDermot, the composer of Hair – set on a Rastafarian beach during Haile Selassie’s interventionist Jamaican visit (to protest against the beach eviction for a tourist hotel) in 1966; and a 1989 Yoruba version of Oedipus Rex, The Gods Are Not to Blame, by the Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, starring Jeffery Kissoon.
A splendid Antony and Cleopatra (1991) – with Kissoon and Doña Croll – was followed in 1994 by King Lear with Ben Thomas in the title role, Cathy Tyson and Lolita Chakrabarti as, respectively, Regan and Goneril, and Hammond as the Fool. These were door-opening moments for black actors in Britain.
After 29 productions for Talawa, Brewster bowed out in 2001 with a Rastafarian musical play, One Love, by the Ghanian poet and musician, Kwame Dawes, at the Bristol Old Vic. The Times applauded six women “full of soul” and the Guardian, the “greasy but strangely attractive” Peter Straker – who sang a lovely duet with Ruby Turner – as a bright light whenever he appeared.
Brewster continued to work in television, appearing as a rather severe nurse, Ruth Harding, in Doctors (in 2000) before retiring, after illness, to Florence with her second husband, Starr Brewster, a businessman, whom she had married in 1971.
She kept an apartment on the Finchley Road in north London, but lived, latterly, with Starr, in an idyllic home in Italy where she compiled several volumes of black writers’ plays – including those of Barry Reckord – for publication. She was made OBE in 1993 and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2002.
Brewster was first married in Kingston in 1961 to Roger Jones, with whom she adopted a son, Julian. They divorced in 1966.
She is survived by Starr, by Julian, and her younger sister, Valerie.
