Although I admired its ambition, I was sceptical about The Coup’s structure when I reviewed it at the National’s Cottesloe theatre (as it then was) in 1991. Looking at the play again, in the light of current events, has given me a whole new perspective.
Mustapha Matura, who died last year, once said that his constant aim was “to examine the effects of colonialism, political and psychological, on the colonisers and the colonised”. The Coup, which deals with a fictional revolution in Matura’s native Trinidad and Tobago, has suddenly acquired a new and chilling relevance.
The two islands have always been at the mercy of foreign invaders. Columbus staked a claim to Trinidad in 1498 and General Abercromby acquired it by force for the British in 1797. Tobago, having first been captured by the French, also passed into British hands before the islands eventually achieved independence in 1962. Given such a past, it is hardly surprising that nationhood came to seem a chimerical concept.
In Matura’s play we see an imprisoned Trinidadian president seeking to regain power by playing off the rival factions during a military uprising. But, although the play has scenes of wild farce, it is clear what Matura’s real target is: the brutal legacy of colonialism, which the president himself defines as “a loss of our sense of history”.
Matura’s skill lies in showing that colonialism takes many forms. The British presence is still palpable in that there is an Abercromby Street in Port of Spain and two of the military plotters are graduates of Sandhurst, described as “that cushy training ground for third world takeover specialists”. A rival faction is backed by the CIA and signs of American soft power are everywhere, from a promised visit by the Harlem Globetrotters to talk of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Meanwhile, communists see the islands as easy meat, with the Cubans sending in commissars masquerading as literacy instructors.
Colonialism, Matura argues, robs a nation of its identity and makes it a prey for competing ideologies. One of Matura’s great gifts, as he showed in Play Mas (1974) and Rum an’ Coca Cola (1976), was to make his political points through laughter. There is a savagely comic scene in The Coup where the victim of a firing-squad delays the fatal moment by dwelling on socioeconomic forces and then demanding a light for his cigarette. Subtitled “a play of revolutionary dreams”, The Coup offers a phantasmagoric portrait of chaos. But, at a time when Britain is being forced to confront its imperialist past, Matura’s play is definitely worth a second look.
