No document available.
Abstract :
[en] Best known as a novelist and an essayist, Caryl Phillips is also a dramatist, both for the stage and the radio. Starting from the idea that radio drama is a generic hinterland, in the sense that it remains largely unexplored, this paper will concentrate on one of Phillips’s plays for radio, Hotel Cristobel, which was broadcast by the BBC in 2005, but started as a stage play. As its title suggests, this text is set in a Caribbean hotel and explores the neo-colonial interactions between three characters who each comes with significant historical luggage. After examining the formal specificities of this radio play in comparison with its stage version, I will analyse how, like Phillips’s 1986 novel A State of Independence, it problematizes the West Indies as a place with a complex and painful history that is nevertheless often regarded in the context of tourism as a hedonistic backwater.
This paper is part of an ongoing project which sets out to produce a critical edition of Caryl Phillips’s radio drama.
