Name Yvonne Brewster Education Rose Bruford College | Books The Undertaker's Daughter | |
 | ||
Home sweet home with angie le mar moments with yvonne brewster obe
Yvonne Brewster, OBE (born 7 October 1938), née Clarke, is a Jamaican-born stage director, teacher and writer. She also co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica.
Contents
- Home sweet home with angie le mar moments with yvonne brewster obe
- Biography
- Awards
- Publications
- References
Biography
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne Brewster went to the UK to study drama in the mid-1950s at the Rose Bruford College - where she was the UK's first Black woman drama student - and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she received a distinction in Drama and Mime. 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.
Upon her return to England 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. In 1985 she co-founded Talawa Theatre Company with Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel, using funding from the Greater London Council (then led by Ken Livingstone). Brewster was Talawa's artistic director until 2003.
She is a patron of the Clive Barker Centre for Theatrical Innovation.
Awards
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. 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.. In 2013 she was named one of BBC's 100 Women.
Publications
In 2004, Brewster published her memoirs, entitled The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (Arcadia Books). She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's For the Reckord (Oberon Books, 2010) and Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, published by Oberon Books in 2012.