From Library Journal
These three early theater experiments by Nobel prize-winning poet and playwright Walcott (Omeros) center around three historical characters: Christoff, Dessaline, and Toussaint L'Ouverture. Moving freely through the history of the West Indies, these verse plays are the work of a powerful imagination struggling to find a language to realize its vision on stage. The first play, "Henri Christophe," is a Shakespearean meditation on the corrupting influence of power, while the second, "Drums and Colours," is a pageant of history from the age of discovery with Columbus to 1833 with Toussaint L'Ouverture. "The Haytian Earth" is a long historical drama of the slavery, rebellion, murder, greed, and power struggles that have fertilized the Haitian earth with blood. Unfortunately, while occasionally brilliant, these plays are too often clumsy and unsure. Stuffed with historical characters, they are too large in scope and too unwieldy in structure to fit on the stage, and the language is more argumentative than dramatic. Recommended for specialists. Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll.,
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From Booklist
Uneven but filled with passages of startling poetry, this loose trilogy of plays, early work by the future Nobel laureate, is noteworthy more because of who Walcott became than because of its merits. Even in his late teens and twenties, Walcott was ambitious.
Henri Christophe recasts the power struggle between the early Haitian leaders Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, both followers of the liberator Toussaint L'Ouverture, as a Shakespearean history play, complete with soliloquies and court intrigues.
Drums and Colours daringly packs 400 years of West Indian history into one epic drama; it sprawls too much to be good theater, but on the page, there is something thrilling about a play that starts with Columbus' difficult third voyage to the New World and ends 182 pages later in the nineteenth century.
The Haitian Earth is more Brechtian in scope and feeling as it dramatizes in a series of laconic scenes the bloody slave revolt that created the first black-run country in the Western Hemisphere. Throughout the trilogy, Walcott's ear for dialect is remarkable.
Jack HelbigCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
