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Yvonne Jones Brewster OBE (née Clarke; born 7 October 1938) is a Jamaican actress, theatre director and businesswoman, known for her role as Ruth Harding in the BBC television soap opera Doctors. She co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica.

Yvonne Brewster
Born	Yvonne Clarke (1938-10-07) 7 October 1938 (age 83) Kingston, Jamaica
Education	Rose Bruford College, Royal Academy of Music
Occupation	Actress theatre director businesswoman
Known for	Co-founder of Talawa Theatre Company

Biography

Born in Kingston, Jamaica,[1] Yvonne Brewster recalls being inspired to become an actress at the age of 16, when her father took her to the Ward Theatre "to see a French play, called Huis Clos, written by Jean Paul Sartre. And in it was Mona Chin, who I thought looked just like me. She was fantastic. I looked at this woman and I said, 'Hey, Daddy, I want to be like her.'"[2] In 1956, Brewster went to the UK to study drama at Rose Bruford College – where she was the UK's first Black woman drama student,[3] being told on her first day that she was unlikely to find theatrical work in Britain[2] – and also attended the Royal Academy of Music, receiving a distinction in Drama and Mime.[4] She returned to Jamaica to teach Drama and in 1965 she also jointly founded (with Trevor Rhone) The Barn in Kingston, Jamaica's first professional theatre company.[5]

Upon her return to England in the early 1970s,[6] she worked extensively in radio, television, and directing for stage productions. Between 1982 and 1984, she was Drama Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain.[4] In 1985 she co-founded Talawa Theatre Company with Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel,[7] using funding from the Greater London Council (then led by Ken Livingstone). Brewster was Talawa's artistic director until 2003,[8] directing a production of C. L. R. James's play The Black Jacobins in 1986 at the Riverside Studios as the first play to be staged by the black-led company, with Norman Beaton in the principal role of Toussaint L'Ouverture.[9] Another landmark came in 1991 when she directed the first all-black production of William Shakespeare`s Antony and Cleopatra, starring Doña Croll and Jeffery Kissoon.[10]

Brewster is a patron of the Clive Barker Centre for Theatrical Innovation.[11]

Personal life

She married after returning to England from Jamaica in 1971, and she and her husband now live in Florence.[2][6]

Awards and recognition

In 1993, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts in the Queen’s New Years Honours list; and in 2001 she was granted an honorary doctorate from the Open University.[6] She received a living legend award from the National Black Theatre Festival in 2001.[6]

She featured on the 2003 list of 100 Great Black Britons.[12] In 2005, the University of London's Central School of Speech and Drama conferred an honorary fellowship on Brewster in acknowledgment of her involvement in the development of British theatre.[4] In 2013 she was named one of BBC's 100 Women.[13]

Publications

In 2004, Brewster published her memoirs, entitled The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (Arcadia Books).[14] She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's For the Reckord (Oberon Books, 2010)[15] and Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, published by Oberon Books in 2012.[16] In 2018 she published Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica's Barn Theatre 1966–2005.[17]

Selected bibliography

• The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (BlackAmber/Arcadia Books, 2004, ISBN 978-1901969245)
• Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre 1965–2005 (Peepal Tree Press, 2017, ISBN 9781845233600)

Further reading

• Rodreguez King-Dorset, Black British Theatre Pioneers: Yvonne Brewster and the First Generation of Actors, Playwrights and Other Practitioners, McFarland & Co, 2014, ISBN 978-0786494859.

References

External links

• Yvonne Brewster at IMDb

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