One of the best plays staged last year was Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, in which an illiterate New York seamstress found self-expression in stitches and fabric. Something of the same thing happens in Play Mas. Mustapha Matura’s 1974 play begins with a Trinidadian tailor talking eloquently about his ideal suit, in which the lapels should “lie down as if dey sleeping for ever” and the buttons march in rows like soldiers.
His voice fades in the course of the play, but the idea of costumes, as disguises and as declarations, lingers. Play Mas looks at Trinidad – its colonisers and its revolutionaries – through the lens of carnival. Mas is short for masquerade, and the drama is full of pretenders. Someone bursts in bristling in military guise, but turns out to be fooling. Someone takes power in a suit, but has little authority. The possibilities opened up are legion, and Paulette Randall’s production, vivid, emphatic and humorous, makes the most of them. She cannot disguise the fact that the play is better written than structured: its later episodes hover over possible themes, enticing rather than convincing. Still, here is another enterprising retrieval of an intriguing play. By a theatre about to lose its regular Arts Council funding.
