ABSTRACT
In 1962 on the occasion of independence celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago, Slade Hopkinson, poet, actor, teacher, in his capacity of drama critic for the government party newspaper, wrote as follows:
Until there is a theatre based on a drama rooted in Trinidad, the theatre and drama in Trinidad will remain essentially artificial, colonial things, interesting chiefly as symptoms of the psychological sickness of a fragmented, confused people-a people who contain the possibility of a unique cultural synthesis and inventiveness, but who prevent the fulfilment of this possibility by not having the courage or the intelligence to become what they in fact are.
