Moon on a Rainbow Shawl Study Guide

Errol John was born in Trinidad in 1924, when it was still a colony of Great Britain. His father, George, had been a famous cricket player who even toured England on an exhibition team in 1923, although by then he was past the prime of his career. John was homeschooled. In 1946, he co-founded a theater group called the Whitehall Players. John moved to England in 1951, part of a mass migration movement that encouraged colonial subjects to immigrate to fill post-WWII labor shortages. John became an active member of the London theater scene and performed in both modern and Shakespearian plays, including playing the title role in Othello in 1962. He also branched out into film, with small roles in movies including The African Queen and The Nun’s Story. As he grew frustrated with the limited roles open to actors of color, he turned to playwriting. In 1957, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl won the Play of the Year award from the British newspaper The Observer; it was produced in London in 1958, in New York in 1962, and around the world in countries as diverse as Iceland, Hungary, and Argentina. In addition, John wrote several other plays and screenplays, although none were ever as famous as Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. John was discovered dead in his apartment in the summer of 1988, shortly after a revival of Moon in London.

The island of Trinidad was officially claimed as a colony by Spain in 1510 and was taken over by the British in 1797. As a British colony, Trinidad’s main commodity was sugarcane, and the colonists relied on the labor of enslaved Black people. In the early 1800s, as England was preparing to abolish slavery both at home and in its colonies, a successful, peaceful rebellion by enslaved workers in Trinidad led to the British government encouraging Indian colonial subjects to immigrate to the island as indentured servants. Given its proximity to rich oil reserves in and around Venezuela, Trinidad was strategically important during the Second World War. US Forces began establishing bases there in the early 1940s, and a dire shortage of staff forced the British military to recruit hundreds of people from the Caribbean for the Royal Air Force. These soldiers still faced discrimination and marginalization in the armed forces (for example, they were usually paid less than their white peers), but service nevertheless offered an opportunity for social advancement. In 1948, The British Nationality Act granted citizenship and free movement for all colonial subjects. This instigated a wave of mass migrations from the Caribbean to England, sometimes called the “Windrush Generation,” of which playwright Errol John was a part.

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl is one of the most famous plays produced by the Caribbean diaspora, but it isn’t the only work. Trinidadian playwright (and acquaintance of Errol John) Errol Hill is known for works that look at the enduring effects of Trinidad’s colonial history. His plays often make use of folk traditions and themes, like in his work Man Better Man, which was published in 1964. Although he was a native of St. Lucia, poet and playwright Derek Walcott also had a long history with Trinidadian theater, and his works—like 1970’s Dream on Monkey Mountain—consider similar themes to Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, such as what it means to forge an identity as a colonial subject, and how marginalized communities both can and cannot escape the pressures of racism, segregation, and poverty. Additionally, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl’s claustrophobic tenement setting anticipates later American productions about the attempts of marginalized and oppressed families to rise above difficult circumstances, including West Side Story (1957) and Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 A Raisin in the Sun.