The University Players pay tribute to Trevor Rhone
The group originally known as the University Players had its first incarnation sixty years ago when it was founded in 1948 by the first batch of undergraduate students at the University of the West Indies at Mona
The most recent dramatic offering
by The University Players paid tribute
to the late Jamaican playwright
Trevor Rhone, with a staging of his
award-winning comedy “Two Can Play”.
The play was given a total of six performances
during October 2009 at
the Philip Sherlock Centre for the
Creative Arts, UWI, Mona, and the
company was able to donate a cheque
for $75,000.00 from the proceeds
of a benefit performance to the McSyl
Basic School in Bellas Gate, St.
Catherine (Mr. Rhone's birthplace)
in his memory.
Two Can Play, a work which won the award for Best
Jamaican Play in 1982, featured performances by 2008
Actor Boy Award nominees Nadean Rawlins and Alwyn
Scott, and was directed by UWI Senior Lecturer and Staff
Tutor Brian Heap, who also won the award for Best
Director last year. An earlier University Players’ appearance
by Nadean Rawlins and Alwyn Scott was in the
Players’ memorable 2009 production of A. R. Gurney’s
Love Letters. In Two Can Play, Scott and Rawlins played
Jim and gloria, a Jamaican couple who try their wildest
schemes to escape Kingston gun crime in the 1970's and establish residence in the United States.
In his original foreword to the play Jamaica’s former Prime
Minister Michael Manley wrote:
Two Can Play is about love, and estrangement; about
domination and liberation; about confusion and compassion.
It is about two human beings who nearly lose one
another but who eventually struggle back together
through uncertainty, through quarrels, through humiliation.
Ultimately, gloria and Jim survive because they learn
to communicate and finally to
re-discover one another
not so much as they were but as what they each can try to
become.
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The University Players production of Two Can Play continues
the tradition of the pursuit of excellence which the company
has established for itself over the past few years. The
University Players is the collective name of a group of
actors and theatre technicians who together constitute the
resident theatre company of the Philip Sherlock Centre for
the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona. The members operate as a
not-for-profit group, which aims to deliver all kinds of theatrical
experiences including alternative, innovative, yet
accessible, forms of performance art, devised and experimental
theatre, important Caribbean plays as well as theatre
of the absurd. The ensemble prides itself on producing
shows that have less commercial appeal and which instead,
serve as a platform for showcasing the scripts of lesser known writers, new local talent and work which addresses
some of the immediate concerns of Caribbean societies.
The group originally known as the University Players had its
first incarnation sixty years ago when it was founded in
1948 by the first batch of undergraduate students at the
University of the West indies at Mona, headed by Owen
Minnott and Denise Mitchell. By the 1960's the
group had become the resident theatre company of the
newly built Creative Arts Centre under the artistic direction
of the Staff Tutor in Drama at that time, Mr. Noel Vaz. The
student drama society was re-named the University
Dramatic Arts Society, and continues to stage its student
productions under that name to this day. Though the
University Players went virtually out of commission during
the decades of the 1980’s and 90’s, the group was resurrected
in 2003 by the current Staff Tutor in drama, Mr.
Brian Heap at the re-dedicated Creative Arts Centre, now
re-named
The Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts,
in honour of the University’s first native-born Vice-Chancellor.
The University Players’ successes to date include Sex?
Thanks! Don’t Mind if I Do... By Nobel Laureate Dario Fo
and his wife Franca Rama; the HIV/AIDS drama One of Our
Sons is Missing by Trinidadian playwright Godfrey Sealy;
the satirical revue The Black That I Am by Jamaican writer
and UWI alumnus Karl Williams; the celebrated play about
Dominican writer Jean Rhys, After Mrs. Rochester by Polly
Teale; the devised historical drama Maharani’s Misery
based on the book of the same name by UWI Professor
Verene Shepherd; the hilarious Alan Ayckbourn comedy
Bedroom Farce; Aime Cesaire’s sweeping Caribbean epic
A Tempest; Yasmina Reza’s sophisticated comic masterpiece
ART; and American playwright A.R. Gurney’s challenging
duologue Love Letters.
The University Players stage productions at the Philip
Sherlock Centre twice per year, in May and October.
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