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First presented at the Royal Court, Jamaican dramatist Barry Reckord's
'You in Your Small Corner' is one of the earliest attempts to represent the
Afro-Caribbean migrant experience from a non-white perspective on British
television.
The play deals with the intricacies of the colour-class complex that affected
both the black and white communities in Britain. Through the story of the
relationship between Dave, a young middle-class West Indian (played by the
writer's brother, Lloyd Reckord), and his white, working-class girlfriend,
Terry, Reckord wanted to show that "class and colour inferiority seem to be the
same - the coloured man is marked by his skin, and the white man is marked by
his accent."
Drawing on Barry Reckord's experience as a Cambridge University student in
the 1950s, the character of Dave embodies the dilemmas and disillusions of the
first postwar generation of black intellectuals. Young Lloyd Reckord brings
passion and sensitivity to a role laden with essay-like references to the
traumas of the colonial experience in a post-imperial world. The sensual scenes
of the two lovers were a bold step for their time but, perhaps surprisingly,
they did not cause any of the controversy that surrounded the interracial kiss
in the more mainstream Emergency Ward 10 (ITV, 1957-67) two years later.
None of the characters can escape from the tyrannies of racial and class
prejudice. Dave cannot hide his disappointment when he finds out that Terry is a
factory worker, and he is particularly bitter about Terry and her family's
attraction to the trappings of consumerist culture (television, rock 'n' roll
music, cars). He is disturbed by the bigotry of Terry's brother, Georgie, but
even more shaken to realise that he feels an outsider to the English high
society he wants to be part of. Mrs Jordan, Dave's domineering mother and
proprietor of a Jamaican social club, fights hard to avoid him being tagged not only
as 'coloured' but also as 'cockney'.
The play's frank sexuality, its passionate exploration of class and racial
differentiations within Britain's black and white population, and its attempt to
break away from the restrictions of a studio-based theatricality through the
expressive use of still photographs laid some of the cornerstones for subsequent
thematic and formal innovations in black-authored drama.
Eleni Liarou
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1. Meeting the family (3:20)
