Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958)

The play had its first performances at the Opera House in Manchester (it was common in this period for plays to preview outside London) before coming to the Royal Court Theatre for its official opening. Just before the first performances racist white youths attacked and harassed the Black residents of Notting Hill (referenced in Day 1, The Wind of Change and Day 6 Advice for the Young at Heart).

The play epitomises the ‘yard’ tradition of Caribbean theatre. Where English plays of this period tend to be set indoors, in one room, yard plays revolve around the shared outdoor space where people meet and interact with their neighbours and people passing in the street. Professor Lynette Goddard explains that:

“Yard plays were a form of Caribbean realism that first appeared in the post-war period and which portrayed the lives of poor working-class communities living in close contact with each other. Compared to the interior settings of the domestic ‘kitchen sink’ plays that were popular in Britain during the 1950s, the main action of yard plays occurs in a shared exterior space of yards or verandas, which are connected to offstage indoor spaces that are not completely visible to audiences.

The outdoor setting enables a range of characters from the community to meet in the shared public space where audiences can observe their relationships with each other. The yard setting of dry grey earth and ramshackle, faded and shabby buildings presents the poverty, simplicity and challenges of the characters’ daily lives. Outside taps, buckets, barrels and other objects give an indication of the manual labour required to fulfil day-to-day activities, such as washing, cooking and cleaning. The yard setting emphasises just how much is at stake in economic migration by showing the struggles of life in the post-war Caribbean. These struggles start to explain why the characters desire to move away from the yard to improve their lives.”

In this period Black actors were mostly cast in small roles as barmen, servants or other small roles, Errol John, the play’s author, was also an actor and part of his motivation for writing the play was to provide Caribbean actors living in England with meaty roles that would showcase their talents. Instead, as was common at the time, most of the cast were African American actors. Their casting led to leading Black British actors, agents and writers to protest to the English actor’s trade union Equity.

The play was televised in 1960. In 1986, John directed a production at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and in 1988, celebrated African American writer Maya Angelou directed a production at the Almeida Theatre in London. It is now one of the most revived Black plays in Britain. In 2003, Eclipse Theatre, set up to address the exclusion of Black voices from British theatre, revived the play, then in 2012, the National Theatre mounted a production in the Cottesloe and in 2014, Talawa Theatre and the National staged a touring version that brought the play to audiences around the UK.

About the writer

Actor, writer and director Errol John (1924-1988) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He co-founded the Whitehall Players theatre group. After the Second World War he moved to London to further his acting career and had a number of minor roles in film and television. He turned to playwriting because of the lack of roles for black actors.

As the Manchester Evening News reported during a promotional interview for Moon: ‘unlike so many of his fellow West Indians, Errol John […] has achieved a big adventure westwards which has not ended in disillusion. But it was a very near thing’ (‘The playwright who nearly went home’, 1958).