[In the following review of A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, Jaggi commends the play's powerful symbolism and humor, though finds shortcomings in its uneven pacing and underdeveloped contemporary parallels.]

The title of Fred D'Aguiar's play sounds an echo of W. B. Yeats's poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Through an episodic, exuberant juxtaposition of dialogue, verse and song, D'Aguiar transfers the poem's ambivalence about fighting another country's battles to the experience of a Jamaican airman in the Second World War.

Set initially in Jamaica in the 1940s, the play satirizes the cynical appeal made to the dominions, to fight for King and country. Kojo, an eccentric creole seer, parodies Churchill's broadcasts with scatological relish, while mocking the gullibility of the young, rum-soaked Jamaicans who enthusiastically queue to join up. D'Aguiar humorously reveals the mixed motives of a naive foursome (played with engaging fervour by Clarence Smith, Sidney Cole, Maynard Eziashi and Fraser James) who enlist more in a spirit of fortune-hunting and sexual bravado than of patriotism. Yet it also exposes their illusions about the metropolitan power (“Britain is the father, Jamaica mother to me”, the boys chant), which others warn against.

As the scene shifts to an airbase in Scotland, disillusionment sets in, with the Jamaican recruits relegated to menial tasks: one cleans the toilets, “flushing out the enemy” in “germ warfare”; others end up in the canteen or the barber-shop. Meanwhile, the locals’ idea of hospitality is to ambush Clarence Smith's Alvin, “to see if he has a tail.” Only Alvin's rescue at the hands of a Yeats-quoting Scottish lass helps thaw the coldness of the welcome. But Alvin, a rear-gunner of prowess, is grounded for accidentally shooting down an Allied plane. In a twist to the title, the Jamaican airman succumbs not to extinction, but to the slower death of insanity, after being labelled a murderer, and dishonourably discharged.

The poet D'Aguiar's gift for metaphor, and the affective power of his language, combine with a quirkily wry humour to propel a drama which sometimes threatens to lose sight of its narrative threads. Through metaphors of flight, or drowning, the play powerfully captures the hopes, bewilderment, vulnerability and blindness of the young volunteers.

Hettie Macdonald's adventurously informal promenade production lends itself to the play's oscillations of mood. Though a little chaotic at the outset, and tending at times to lose paces it settles into an exciting unpredictability, as the roving audience (offered rum punch and peanuts at the door) literally pursues the action into the various corners of the theatre. The only drawback to the production is its resolute rootedness in the Second World War years, which muffles resonances for the present. Neither simply about the war years, nor about racial bias within the armed forces, the play also serves to dramatize the hopes and disillusionment of all those who have been lured to the metropolis. Urgent parallels with the present are hinted at in Alvin's fateful encounter with British justice which condemns him not for his actions but for his colour. His consequent decline into mental illness also mirrors a grim sociological reality.

D'Aguiar's play sparks important issues which he has the demonstrable talent to develop further and more boldly. In this production, energetic and engaging as it is, they run the risk of being comfortingly relegated to a distant past.