Yvonne Brewster, who received classical stage training in London in the 1950s, proceeded to carve an artistic space for herself in her native Jamaica and eventually co-founded one of Britain’s foremost theater companies for Black and Caribbean actors, directors and writers, died on Oct. 12 in Florence, Italy. She was 87.
Her death, at her home, was confirmed by the Talawa Theater Company, which she helped start in 1986 in London.
Stage-struck from 16, Ms. Brewster went to Britain in the 1950s to study acting — only to be told that she was unlikely to find jobs because of her race. Over the following decades, she helped start Jamaica’s first professional theater company and went back to England to work as a freelance director with stage organizations. A growing ambition to start her own group and a stint on the grant-making national Arts Council, she said, helped her learn “how it worked.”
Talawa, which she said means small but mighty in Jamaican patois, often staged shows in conjunction with other companies. The work spanned contemporary and classical plays, including all-Black productions of Oscar Wilde comedies and Shakespeare tragedies as well as contemporary works by James Baldwin, Derek Wolcott and Ntozake Shange.
“Our policy was to give Black actors work they weren’t being offered — and nobody was offering them the chance to do Shakespeare,” Ms. Brewster, who served as Talawa’s artistic director for nearly two decades, recalled to The Guardian in 2016.
The company has remained a proving ground for minority actors and a place for veteran Black and Caribbean performers to stretch beyond roles on television sitcoms. Sharon D. Clarke starred in Mr. Walcott’s reggae-rock musical “O Babylon!” in 1988 for Talawa at the start of her high-profile stage and screen career. Ms. Brewster cast Ben Thomas in 1994 as one of the first Black actors to play King Lear on a professional stage in England. And the actor Don Warrington starred in a well-received all-Black production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” in 2013, followed by a turn as Lear three years later.
“It is perhaps thanks to Talawa that these days you probably wouldn’t even consider that an actor couldn’t do Shakespeare because of their ethnicity — it just wouldn’t be a thought,” Michael Buffong, the company’s artistic director, told The Daily Telegraph in March.
Other Black companies had sprouted up in Britain by the late 1970s, and Ms. Brewster had worked for several of them. By most accounts, Talawa benefited from her promotional skills, indefatigable energy and connections to the cultural establishment through the Arts Council. She and three others with long theater résumés started Talawa.
“We realized we had 120 years’ experience in theater between us,” Ms. Brewster later said, “so why couldn’t we have a theater company?”
The group’s first production was a staging of C.L.R. James’s “The Black Jacobins,” about a revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture among enslaved people on what became Haiti. A half-century after Paul Robeson first played L’Ouverture in London, Norman Beaton, a Guyanese-born actor, performed the starring role for Talawa in rented space at Riverside Studios in London.
The show received mixed reviews that praised the actors over a shopworn script spruced up with modern vernacular. The founders took it as a success, and they began staging new plays with increasing regularity and to better critical feedback.
To widespread praise, Ms. Brewster directed a touring production of Federico García Lorca’s lust-honor-revenge drama “Blood Wedding,” reset in Cuba instead of Spain. It played at the National Theater in 1991. The next year, she directed Wole Soyinka’s “The Road” at Talawa’s short-lived home stage at the Cochrane Theater in London.
In her focus on all-Black casts and re-workings of classics — one play reset “Oedipus Rex” in Nigeria — Ms. Brewster’s motivation was always artistic, she said; if it had been political, she told The Observer in 1991, she “would have cast the servants as white” in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Ms. Brewster’s resistance to the “expectation that Black productions must make an explicit political statement” was itself inherently political, said Lynette Goddard, a professor of Black theater and performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She called Ms. Brewster’s impact “immense.”
Elsie Yvonne Clarke was born on Oct. 7, 1938, in Kingston, Jamaica, to Claude Clarke, a land surveyor, and Kathleen Issacs, who took over her family’s funeral business.
“My grandfather was a Jew from Poland who trained as a lawyer and ended up in Jamaica as an undertaker,” Ms. Brewster told The Guardian, explaining the origin of her love of the arts. “He was a very intelligent man and took me under his wing: made me listen to Ella Fitzgerald and read Dickens. He used to quote Shakespeare when he was shaving — ‘Out, damned spot!’ I was brought up with Shakespeare as a friend, and my grandfather taught me to take the words from the page to the stage.”
The pivotal moment in her youth was being mesmerized by a local production of “No Exit,” the Jean-Paul Sartre existentialist drama. The show starred a woman only seven years Ms. Brewster’s senior, Mona Hammond, who after a long career in British television became one of Talawa’s founders.
Within a few years, Yvonne enrolled at the Rose Bruford College for speech and drama in London and took additional classes at the Royal Academy of Music. She told The Western Daily Press, a British newspaper, that she was mostly employed in “weird roles as exotic Black fairies and so on,” and her ambition to act waned.
Returning to Jamaica, she taught high school drama, dabbled in radio and television interviews with visiting celebrities and, in 1965, co-founded with the playwright Trevor Rhone Jamaica’s first professional theater company, Theater ’77 (later renamed the Barn Theater).
Even as the Barn continued for four decades, Ms. Brewster moved back to England in 1971 after her marriage to Roger Francis Jones ended in divorce and she married Starr Brewster, a businessman.
She is survived by her husband and their son, Julian, as well as her sister, Valerie.
Ms. Brewster lived in Florence with her husband until the end of her life but kept a home in London. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for her services to the arts.
She told The Guardian in 2015 that when she enrolled in drama school in London, “the first thing Rose Bruford told me was: ‘Well, we can take your money, but don’t expect to get any work.’”
“My reaction could have been to go back home,” she said, “but I thought, ‘Watch this space.’”
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