MUSTAPHA MATURA'S "PLAYBOY OF THE WEST INDIES": A CARNIVAL DISCOURSE ON IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY

Mustapha Matura's adaptation of Playboy of the Western World to a West Indian locality and a West Indian cultural milieu, transforms Synge's play into distinctly West Indian theatre. Everything is reinterpreted and modified to reflect a West Indian reality. The central themes and metaphors of the play, the language, the setting, and the characters are all essentially West Indian.1 Matura's adaptation of Synge's play is as imitative and original as Trinidad's Carnival, which characteristically makes wide use of forms and images from a variety of cultures.2 Playboy of the West Indies is a Carnival masquerade; a drama of imitation and adaptation from which indigenous culture emerges refreshed and strengthened. Imitation and originality have long been issues in West Indian literature. Derek Walcott, whose The Sea at Dauphin is loosely modelled after Synge's Riders to the Sea, and who was commissioned by England's Royal Shakespeare Company to write an adaptation of Tirso de Molina's El Burladorde Sevilla, has definite views on the subject. "The whole course of imitations and adaptations is simply a method of apprenticeship," Walcott says in an interview with Edward Hirsch3: "If you know very clearly that you are imitating such and such a work, it isn't that you're adopting another man's genius; it is that he has done an experiment that has worked and will be useful to all writers afterwards" (289). For Walcott, imitation and as similation precede originality. The other side of this argument is articulated most fully in the works of V.S. Naipaul, for whom imitation and assimilation are essentially uncrea