Alfred Fagon - A Unique Caribbean Voice

Having migrated from Jamaica as a teenager, Alfred Fagon emerged as a powerful playwright who created African-Caribbean characters to speak truths about the challenges facing black people in Britain. Stephen Bourne introduces a writer who helped transform black British theatre in the 1970s and 80s

- By Stephen Bourne . Photographs Rachael Dickens, Alamy, Dreamstime, Getty and Hampstead Theatre

On 11 June 2020, a statue in Bristol was damaged. But while the media debates continued to rage about the toppling of the figure of slave trader Edward Colston during a Black Lives Matter protest the previous week, the defacement of this bronze bust in the St Pauls area attracted little comment. Arguably, though, the man depicted, the groundbreaking playwright and actor Alfred Fagon, is much more relevant to Bristol's residents today than the controversial merchant who lived three centuries earlier.

Born in southern Jamaica in 1937, one of 11 children of an orange-plantation worker, Fagon migrated to Britain in 1955 when his homeland was still a colony of the empire. Initially, the teenager worked for British Rail in Nottingham before a stint in the army - during which he became a boxing champion in the Royal Corps of Signals - and he then spent time travelling. By the time that Jamaica gained its independence in 1962, Fagon had made Bristol his home, settling in St Pauls and working as a welder. It was not long, however, before he began pursuing his dream of being an actor and writer.

In 1970, he won a role in Black Pieces by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. This was a breakthrough for Fagon in more ways than one: not only did it mark his London acting debut, but Matura had broken new ground with this work in encouraging his actors to speak in patois, the dialect of the Caribbean islands. Until that point, Fagon had never seen patois written down let alone used in theatre.

His friend Roland Rees, a pioneering theatre director, later observed how Black Pieces had “persuaded (Fagon) that he could write plays with characters that could tell his stories, culled from his own experience, in a language natural to them.