Alfred Fagon Selected Plays

Despite the legacy of his eponymous award, Alfred Fagon’s stage works have often been forgotten due to them not being available. This anthology of selected plays brings together his shorter works for the first time into one volume that expands his legacy and confirms his place as one of Britain’s key writing talents of the twentieth century.

Originally an actor, Fagon’s writing for the stage, film and television grew throughout the early 1970s, before his breakaway hit TheDeath of A Black Man was produced at the Hampstead Theatre in 1975. Now one of British theatre’s most well-known names, Fagon’s legacy is secured due in no small part to the commemorative award in his honour that was established following his death in 1986, to recognise Black British playwrights from the Caribbean, resident in the United Kingdom.

Brought together with a critical introduction from Dawn Walton OBE, this collection also includes a reflection and response from a former winner of the Alfred Fagon award, Juliet Gilkes Romero.

The plays include:

A Day in the Bristol Air Raid Shelter
Adventure Inside Thirteen
Four Hundred Pounds
No Soldiers in St Paul’s
Shakespeare Country
Small World
Weekend Lover

Alfred Fagon was born on 25 June, 1937 in Clarendon, Jamaica into a large and close family of eight brothers and two sisters. He left school at thirteen and worked with his father as a cultivator on their orange plantation. In 1955 he came to Nottingham in England and worked for British Rail amongst other jobs, and in 1958 joined the Royal Corps of Signals where he became Middleweight Boxing Champion in 1962, the year he left the Army.. He started working as an actor and in 1970 he came to London to play in Mustapha Matura’s ’Black Pieces’ at the ICA the first of many roles, not just in the theatre but in television, film and radio. Alfred’s final acting role in BBC Television’s Fighting Back with Hazel O’Connor was filmed in St Paul’s, Bristol. Alfred Fagon died of a heart attack on 29 August, 1986 at the age of forty-nine.