Remembrance and Pantomime: A Play

Derek Walcott

Sep 2014 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

First produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in 1979, Remembrance is the story of an evasively eloquent retired teacher who cannot reconcile his anachronistic love of British culture with the evolution of his family and community in independent Trinidad. "A lyrical, audience-pleasing work" (Variety). Mr. Walcott is a poet, and his writing is of a quality we seldom hear in the theatre" (The New Yorker).

Pantomime is a fast-paced comedy set in Tobaco. In the hope of entertaining future guests, an English hotel owner proposes that he and his black handyman work up a satire on the Robinson Crusoe story. The play was produced by BBC Radio and London's Keskidee Theatre in 1979. "A brilliantly extended set of variations on the master-and-servant relationship" (The Times). "Gentle wit, immaculately placed irony" (New Statesman). "Dazzling theatrical virtuosity" (Financial Times).

About the author

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.