Walcott, Derek (Vol. 2) | Walcott, Derek 1930–
Walcott, Derek 1930–
A poet and playwright, born in the West Indies where he still lives, Walcott is the author of In a Green Night and The Dream on Monkey Mountain.
Derek Walcott's The Dream on Monkey Mountain [is] a work of intense verbal and visual beauty, and visionary insight. It's also fun. A "quest" play in the Peer Gynt-Camino Real genre (and nearer in quality to the former than the latter), it takes the form of a dream….
In Walcott's dense, poetic text and in the visual images on-stage there is a brilliantly successful marriage of classical tradition and African mimetic-dance elements, two strains that are bound as one into the author's British colonial childhood. And in the myth of Makak, an ultimately universal figure, there is achieved some resolution of the conflict between black roots and white culture. This is a superb play.
W. I. Scobie, "The West Coast Scene," in National...
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