“Here’s dramatic irony for you. In his essay ‘A Century of Theatre in Jamaica’, written for the Actor Boy Awards magazine of March 2000, theatre historian Wycliffe Bennett writes “the theatre remained well into the 20th century the almost exclusive preserve of the predominantly white but numerically small element of the Jamaican society”. And he adds a few paragraphs later: “It was an Englishman, Orford St John, who in establishing his group, the Repertory Players [in 1957], first specifically used the term ‘inter-racial company’.”[more…] The vast majority of the plays staged in Jamaica during the first half of the 20th century were non-Jamaican. But even after black Jamaicans began taking over the…