Set in Tobago and first staged in 1978, Derek Walcott's play Pantomime is a two-act comedy about an English hotelier who proposes to his Trinidadian employee that they act together in a race-reversed satire of Robinson Crusoe.
Operating a rundown guest house in the recently independent former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, Harry Trewe, a retired music hall performer, devises an idea to entertain his guests: staging a pantomime he once coauthored based on the Robinson Crusoe story. Knowing his sarcastic factotum, Jackson Phillip, is a retired calypso performer, Harry suggests that they act together in the show. However, Jackson is unwilling to demean himself by playing Friday, the "naked cannibal" turned servant to Crusoe. When Harry suggests that Jackson play Crusoe, Jackson works a critique of imperialism into his improvisation. The politics of Jackson's performance rankles Harry, and the two end up discussing, with growing tension, their imbalanced relationship as white and Black, colonizer and colonized, master and servant. Jackson eventually helps Harry work through his unacknowledged grief over his dead son and his resentment of his ex-wife, a superior actor who humiliated Harry in the first pantomime by playing Crusoe herself and making Harry play Friday. In the end, Jackson agrees to become a performer again, on the condition that Harry give him a raise.
Exploring themes of performance, isolation, mimicry, compromise, and the postcolonial relationship between colonizer and the colonized, Pantomime depicts two men struggling to attain equality despite historical determinants. The play was first produced at the Little Carib Theatre in Trinidad in 1978, followed by a BBC production in 1979.
