The first of Mustapha Matura’s plays I saw was As Time Goes By at the Royal Court in London. It was 1971 and I was at drama school. Until then I hadn’t seen a play dealing with immigrants in such an irreverent and funny way. It depicts the tenacity and imagination that this bunch of people found in themselves to cope with the situation they were in.
When Talawa theatre company asked me to direct one of his plays, Rum and Coca Cola, for a 2010 touring production, I was shocked and excited. I’d never directed before. That play is about a Trinidadian phenomenon, calypso, and its function within the community. It was quite subversive really, how he took these mythologies and reinterpreted them from his point of view.
I don’t think Mustapha and I were ever formally introduced. We would speak but never sat down and had a detailed conversation – it was more a recognition over the barricades.
There are lots of plays he will be remembered for – Play Mas, Playboy of the West Indies – it’s a question of whether people revive them. Several will stand the test of time. He brought a fresh voice and a new perspective to English drama.
He brought with him the place he came from – what it was to be part of the Commonwealth, part of a colony, and how England impacted on his island in the West Indies. Mustapha articulated that wave of people coming from the new world to the old world – the generation who discovered England as it was, as opposed to the England that was in their heads.
