Anguilla’s respected playwright, Mr. Felix Fleming, and his theatrical team, will again be on stage for three nights – September 7, 8 and 9 – engaged in the staging of an American-written play entitled “Guilty Conscience”.
According to Mr. Fleming (unwilling to give details of the production): “It is a drama which displays a very prominent Caribbean lawyer who wants to murder his wife. So he plays out several scenarios in his mind, and these scenarios materialize on stage with our actors. It is a fantastic script written by a guy named Richard Wilkinson, a former US very prolific writer, now passed. I cannot give away the details but that is the plot line. It is amazing how it turns out. I wanted to do it for a number of years and I thought this would be a good time.”
Asked what message the play, which was first staged in Anguilla last month, would send to the people of Anguilla, Mr. Fleming replied: “I think it is high drama. I think we have a very select theatre group in Anguilla which understands what theatre does. When the Commissioner of Police, Mr. Paul Morrison, came to see the play, he said to some of his men: ‘I hope you see the possibilities of what you are up against.’ It means that anybody can learn from theatre but, in this particular play, you can see the possibilities of how things can be done. This should give a heads-up to police officers about what possibilities they may face.”
By producing the above play, Mr. Fleming is taking a brief break from his own very popular plays. His most recent play was for Anguilla Day, this year, and was entitled “Pepper in dey soup”. He has another of his plays which he wrote some years ago, but never produced, coming up in the near future.
“As a matter of fact, I will tell you what I did this morning (Monday, August 27),” he told The Editor of The Anguillian newspaper: “For the first time, in a long time, I pulled out one of my old plays that had never been produced in Anguilla. It is called ‘In The Beginning’. It is a Biblical play and we haven’t done anything religious in about five to six years, so I said next year is time to present a religious play – and what better than bringing a new play that Anguillians hadn’t seen? It is not a new play for me as I have written it many years ago. It is a musical play.”
The Anguillian dramatist has one major drawback. It is that Hurricane Irma completely destroyed his theatre building at Lone Star at Sandy Hill, the property of his wife, Mona. “We have now built a temporary theatre so that we can continue,” he explained. “If I were to stop and wait until we can get a properly functional theatre, we might be waiting for years… So I said let me do this temporary place since the hurricane broke down the building. We had worked on the downstairs of Mona’s old building for two years to make it functional; but we were only able to produce one show – the Anguilla play – before the hurricane came.”
“What is the future of Mona’s old building?” he was asked.
“That has to be pushed down,” he replied. “The heavy concrete from upstairs fell on the floor, breaking the columns and beams downstairs – so it has to be demolished. It was the first hurricane that made me cry.”
“You are doing a very good job of keeping the oral tradition alive by your plays,” The Anguillian told Fleming.
“You have to do that,” he responded.
