BBC to air calypso radio drama The Mighty Corbeau

RAY FUNK

In October last year, it was announced that Julien Neaves, a former Newsday reporter and freelance writer, had won the BBC World Service British Council International Radio Playwriting Competition 2023 for English as a first language, in a competition that received hundreds of scripts.

Now his winning entry will be broadcast on the BBC World Service, on June 8 at 2 pm Trinidad and Tobago time and on June 9 at 4 am and 7 am TT time. After those initial broadcasts, it will be available for an extended period on the BBC Sounds website.

The Mighty Corbeau is about Brian Gonzales, an elderly calypsonian, and the many challenges he and his family face as he tries to revive his career though suffering from health issues.

Neaves describes the play as “a tale of identity, love and memory set to the melodic tunes of calypso music and the pulsating sounds of stickfighting.” It is his first radio play to be broadcast. He’s very excited and looks forward to what people will think about it.

A longtime listener to the BBC World Service, Neaves had known about the competition for years and had previously submitted a play called Tanty Get ah Android, which won the 2018 Caribbean competition. That encouraged him to apply again.

This time he won the international competition, which meant his play would be produced for broadcast.

Neaves attended UWI, Mona, and developed a love for drama as a student. He wrote and performed plays for the Talawa Festival, the annual university drama competition in Jamaica. He is thankful for veteran acting friends who put together a dramatic reading of his draft play as he was working on it.

Part of the prize was a trip to the UK to attend the recording. The assigned director, Tracey Neale, a longtime BBC drama producer, contacted him ahead of time and suggested changes that he believes strengthened the play.

“She told me who the actors were and she kept me informed of what was happening up to the time when I arrived in London.”

The BBC chose a very experienced cast for the play.

Neaves was already familiar with the lead actor who plays Brian Gonzales.

“That's Don Warrington, from the long-running detective series Death in Paradise. He’s a Trinidad-born British actor who has quite a long history.”

Warrington has appeared in film, stage, radio and TV, first starring as Philip in the classic TV sitcom Rising Damp. He’s performed with the National Theatre and, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and starred as King Lear in a 2016 Talawa Theatre production.

Suzette Llewellyn, who plays Corbeau’s wife Sheila, has also had a long career on stage, television and radio, with long runs in the TV series East Enders and Coronation Street. Recently, she co-edited a book, Still Breathing, 100 Black Voices on Racism, 100 Ways to Change the Narrative (2021).

Neaves went up last November for a week for the recording.

“We did a reading and then we went into the recording room, and we started recording…I was surprised by how involved I would be. I thought I was just going to be a participant observer, sit down and watch them work.

“But the director was asking, 'Julien, how do you feel about this? Should we do this? Should we cut this?'”

He got to interact with the cast and had a memorable time.

“It was very collaborative, which I did like.”

There’s some singing in the play, a bit of pan and a stickfighting scene, so Trinidadian composer Dominique Le Gendre was called in to compose the score for the production. She is celebrated for many compositions, working on stage, film, television and radio, including music for the complete Arkangel Shakespeare plays (a radio series of 38 of Shakespeare’s 39 plays produced from 1998 onwards and featuring mainly Royal Shakespeare Company actors).

Le Gendre was co-curator of London is the Place for Me, a festival celebration of the 50th anniversary of TT’s independence in 2012 and has written music for productions of both Mustapha Matura’s Rum and Coca-Cola and his Playboy of the West Indies. She co-composed, with Caitlyn Kamminga, Jab Molassie, a Trinidadian re-creation of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale that was produced in 2014.

The world of radio plays has shrunk in the days since TT and other Caribbean countries used to put out many local productions, and now the BBC is one of the few radio services that does. Over the years it has featured many by TT writers including Samuel Selvon and Errol John, but The Mighty Corbeau is the first in many years that it has produced by a Trinidadian author about a very Trinidadian subject.