Yvonne Jones BrewsterOBE (néeClarke; 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.
Biography
Born in Kingston, Jamaica,[1] Brewster said she was 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]
In 2004, Brewster published her memoirs, entitled The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (Arcadia Books).[15] She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's For the Reckord (Oberon Books, 2010)[16] and Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, published by Oberon Books in 2012.[17] In 2018 she published Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica's Barn Theatre 1966–2005.[18]
Selected bibliography
The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (BlackAmber/Arcadia Books, 2004, ISBN978-1901969245)
Rodreguez King-Dorset, Black British Theatre Pioneers: Yvonne Brewster and the First Generation of Actors, Playwrights and Other Practitioners, McFarland & Co, 2014, ISBN978-0786494859.
^Notes on contributors, in Geoffrey V. Davis, Anne Fuchs (eds), Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice, Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2006, p. 337.