Moonlight Schooner, by Kanika Ambrose, is currently playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre in a production directed by Sabryn Rock.  It’s set on May Day 1958 and a group of Black sailors have been stranded on St. Kitt’s by a storm.  It being a holiday they decide to have a night on the town.

With inhibitions lowered by alcohol each man is freer to express his hopes and fears for the future; hopes and fears that are conditioned by colonialism as it manifested in the British Caribbean in the period shortly before independence.  That background and the stories it created is not a period I’m deeply immersed in and Ambrose obviously is.  My knowledge comes from the stories that came out of the Windrush scandal, Caribbean origin guys who worked for me on Merseyside and, above all, CLR James’ writings on cricket in the Caribbean.  If you have never read a Marxist analysis of cricket and colonialism Beyond a Boundary is a must read.  So, I think I missed a lot of nuances in Moonlight Schooner.

Some things do come across very clearly though. Jamie Robinson plays the mixed race (part white) character Sabine.  He knows he is different and so do his mates.  He writes poetry influenced by the kind of English poetry taught in schools of the period.  He yearns for a sort of comfortable middle class English stability that colonialism can’t accommodate.  There’s young Vincy; played by danjelani ellis.  He’s the optimist.  Britain is the land where the streets are paved with gold and at the end we see him on a ship bound for England where, one suspects, his dreams will be broken under a grey Notting Hill sky.  Timothy (Daren A. Herbert) and Lyle (Tony Ofori) are basically reconciled to their lot, as long as it includes plenty of booze and girls.  This is somewhat balanced by Janine (Nehassaiu deGannes); the respectable woman in whose house the men find shelter.

All of this comes out in episodes during the celebrations.  There’s not really what you could call an overarching narrative but the individual scenes are often very funny and sometimes quite touching.  It’s all in fairly dense Caribbean dialect which is understandable but sometimes the effort required to decipher the words results in one not fully grasping what’s behind them.  Or, at least, that was my experience.

I really enjoyed some of Ambrose’s earlier works like Of the Sea and The Christmas Market.  With Moonlight Schooner I found myself having to work much harder.  Maybe it’s a play one has to see more than once?

Moonlight Schooner by Kanika Ambrose is A Necessary Angel Theatre production in association with Canadian Stage and Tarragon Theatre.  It’s playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre until December 14th.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz.