Mustapha Matura was a Trinidadianplaywright living in London. Characterised by critic Michael Billington as "a pioneering black playwright who opened the doors for his successors", Matura was the first British-based dramatist of colour to have a play in London's West End, with Play Mas in 1974. He was described by the New Statesman as "the most perceptive and humane of Black dramatists writing in Britain."
Career
Born Noel Mathura in Port of Spain, Trinidad, he changed his name when he became a writer, and explained: "I liked the sound of it.... It was the sixties." Leaving the Caribbean, he travelled to England by ship in 1962, and after a year working as a hospital porter he and fellow Trinidadian Horace Ové went to Rome, where he worked on stage productions such as Langston Hughes' Shakespeare in Harlem. Matura thereafter decided to write plays about the West Indian experience in London. Matura's play As Time Goes By was first performed in 1971 at the Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh and in London at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, with a cast of Caribbean actors, including Stefan Kalipha, Alfred Fagon, Mona Hammond and Corinne Skinner-Carter. Play Mas was first performed at the Royal Court in 1974, winning Matura the London Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright Award that year. It would be revived in 2015 at the Orange Tree Theatre, directed by Paulette Randall in what was described by The Guardian as a "beautifully observed production... a richly informative play that raises big questions about the nature of liberation, and is also hilariously precise about the shifting balance of power." Among Matura's subsequent plays were Rum and Coca Cola, Another Tuesday, More, More, Independence, A Dying Business ; One Rule, Meetings, Playboy of the West Indies, Trinidad Sisters and The Coup. In 1978, he co-founded the Black Theatre Co-operative together with British director Charlie Hanson. "Frustrated by the lack of interest from London Fringe theatres in Matura's new play Welcome Home Jacko, Matura and Hanson set up their own theatre company. Welcome Home Jacko was presented at The Factory in Paddington, west London, in May 1979 and marked the beginnings of the Black Theatre Co-operative. The company supported, commissioned and produced work by black writers in Britain." Matura's work for television includes the Channel 4 sitcom No Problem!, written by him with Farrukh Dhondy, and Black Silk, which he devised in collaboration with Rudy Narayan. Matura was also a poet, and in Bayswater, West London, in 1971 he performed his epic poem "Elae Elae Ghanga", and featured in an evening of poetry and music on Friday, 29 October, organised by the Caribbean Artists Movement, along with James Berry, T-Bone Wilson, Louis Marriott, Marc Matthews and Archie Markham.
