Staging The Polished Hoe

Last night was the gala presentation of Colin Taylor's adaption of Austin Clarke's awarding winning novel The Polished Hoe. Taylor's adaptation of the novel strips it down to a bare bones play. In the play, just like the novel the central drama is of Mary Matilda making her confession to the police. However, the play is not capable of demonstrating in any detailed manner the way Mary Matilda's story is the story of a people and a society. Despite the play's limitations to be detailed and nuance, Taylor does gets the uptight social and bodily aspect of Bajan society dead right. Alison Sealy-Smith's performance as Mary Matilda is excellent and it is clear that she will get even better in the role as time progress. Thus far the reviews of the play have been quite harsh. While the Toronto Star's critic and the Globe and Mail's critic concur on many of the same points, I must confess that the play is not as bad as their reviews suggest. Staging remains a problem like both critics state and the attempts to deal with memory or flashbacks is not very completing given the different devices being used, but overall the play offers a really interesting slice of Clarke's masterpiece. The language of the characters is bang on and the aspects of Barbadian society with its Victorian manners and nuance class practices are well acted. The cast is able to bring to light the disturbing mix of race, class and sex that remains a difficult topic still for many Barbadians and further still many black diasporic people in the Americas.




After the play last night tributes were paid to Austin Clarke. The retiring Chief Justice of the Ontario Supreme Court, The Honorable Roy McMurtry; Publisher and Editor Patrick Crean; a TD Canada Trust representative and Professor Rinaldo Walcott, all spoke. Below is Walcott's tribute. Clarke thanked the community and dreamed out loud about what he would do with the Walnut Hall heritage site on Shuter Street if TD Canada Trust brought it and turned it over to him.

Walcott's Tribute to Clarke.

Few of us will ever become a national treasure in ONE nation -- furthermore TWO! Austin "Tom" Clarke is a national treasure here in Canada and in his ancestral and birth home, Barbados. i have known Austin personally for about a decade, but I have known Tom Clarke much longer. In my relationship with him, Austin and Tom come together and in that coming together his uniqueness shines through. Generous, thoughtful, committed, luscious -- always a gentleman -- if not a dandy. Definitely an artist and an intellectual, Austin Tom Clarke is singular -- one of a kind.

I am extremely pleased to share in the experience of his art; his ideas; and his environment -- always carefully created. I want to say that because Clarke is a friend that he is special, but that would be not the whole truth and probably arrogant of me -- a Clarke phrase if there ever was one. Austin Tom Clarke, Clarkie, Tom, Austin is unique because HE is one of those RARE individuals who is capable of reflecting back to all of us our interconnectedness not by looking in from outside but by being a central part of the everyday banal drama of ordinary life in its pain and pleasure.

I am honored to be here to celebrate the adaptation of "Tom's" masterpiece The Polished Hoe, set in Barbados but conditioned by Canada. I, We love you man!

All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.