Black Plays: Two

With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.