Yvonne Brewster – författare

With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.

This is a wide-ranging selection by theatre director Yvonne Brewster Boy with Beer by Paul Boakye is a funny and sexy story of a Guardian-reading gay photographer who finds his fantasy "African Prince" - "Boakye's writing is brash and exceedingly fresh...Boy with Beer has cutting edge" (Independent); A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death by Fred D'Aguiar takes Yeats's famous poem and twists it into a rhapsody from a colonial perspective in WW2 Scotland - "A tough, warm and thrillingly individual play full of live-wire humour and athletic assurance...The writing is reckless but controlled, the humour dark, ribald and dangerous...simply bursts with that fiery energy of which true theatre is made" (John Peter, Sunday Times).Munda Negra by Bonnie Greer examines the heart of darkness in Western civilisation - "Greer is clearly a writer of imagination" (The Times); Scrape off the Black by Tunde Ikoli is an East End mixed-race family drama - "Ikoli's play is funny, wry and at times positively searing" (Jim Hiley, Listener); Talking in Tongues by Winsome Pinnock explores issues around mixed race matches in modern-day Britain - "Winsome Pinnock, a writer of extraordinary promise, is here expressing with guile and tenacity, many unsayable things about sexual and social miscegenation...she writes with enormous verve." (Michael Coveney, Observer)

In 2012 Jamaica celebrates the 50th anniversary of Independence. Mixed Company is a collection of three of the finest early Jamaican theatrical works, written for the most part before the dawn of Independence.Written in 1954 (The Creatures by Cicely Waite-Smith), 1960 (Bedward by Louis Marriott) and 1970 (Maskarade by Sylvia Wynter), the plays are examples of works conceived with a Jamaican audience in mind, a Jamaican audience conscious of the melting pot in which it lived. Each offers a unique perspective on the spirit of a people who held on to traditional beliefs and customs in the face of colonial opprobrium as the populace struggled to gain its political, social and cultural independence.Yvonne Brewster talks to Woman's Hour about Jamaican indpendence