Trinidad and Tobago's Barry wins regional BBC playwriting prize

 PLAYWRIGHT Eric Barry said it’s an honour to have been chosen as the regional winner of the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition 2020. His play, Delisa Brings Home the Rainbow, was selected as the Caribbean winner.
Barry said many people had called him about it when the announcement was made.
“It was interesting that so many people are happy, I can’t believe – some are more happy than I am, in some cases, at the win. It feels good that in these terrible times we have some good news for a change.”
He said this was the first time he had entered the competition, though friends had sent him the ad and urged him to enter for many years. This particular time there was "almost an avalanche" of people suggesting he enter. He said the deadline was midnight on January 31, and he had sent in his entry an hour before the deadline, as he began late.
In Delisa Brings Home the Rainbow, Barry tells the story of a family whose lives are disrupted when their daughter brings home a friend from university.
“It’s a double-header party: the husband and wife...have been married for 25 years, he becomes regional manager of a Caribbean bank, and the wife is a writer whose book is on the school syllabus and she gives herself airs. Their daughter who has been away at university is coming home for the first time after graduation and she brings home a friend. She has changed and this is causing a friction in the home, especially with the mother, as everything the daughter is now, the mother is not, and the friend even worse.
"That’s all I can say right now.”
Barry said he wrote the play many years ago for a friend as part of an inter-bank competition, but wasn’t used.
“I just brought it up and transformed it into a radio play. It was a ten-minute sketch, and I did it on stage when I began staging my own productions.
"The radio play is 45 minutes long, so I expanded the story and changed things here and there and that’s where it sprang from.”
He said there is no prize attached to the award “other than the honour of being the region’s best for the year, and the BBC will only produce the top winning plays I believe.
"If I can, I will produce it myself, because I have the experience. This is the first prize of its kind for me in terms of a radio play, but my work has won seven Cacique awards in the past.”
Barry said friends who read the script before he submitted it were thrilled with it.
“I think it’s something audiences would like to hear, not because I wrote it, but because it’s a good story. I would love to produce it sometime next year and have it on the air.”
He said while he wasn’t sure he would enter the competition again next year, he might enter the Commonwealth Short Story competition.
“I have a story I’ve been writing for the last five years. Prose is not my strength. So I’ve been very slow with that. It is quite a story.
"So (with) the adrenaline I have from this win, I want to go back to that story and finish it and enter the Commonwealth Short Story competition as well.
"I don’t know if I’ll have another radio play for January, but we’ll see what could happen.”
Barry is an award-winning playwright, film-maker, actor and advertising copywriter.
His play Better, Better Village won second place at the 2017 Prime Minister's Best Village Trophy Competition. 
He is the writer of radio plays The Rough Season (2004), a ten-part soap opera on hurricane preparedness for the English-speaking Caribbean territories, and Hush (2009) a six-part radio soap opera on child sexual abuse and HIV/AIDS.
He has written and directed numerous television ad campaigns, including a four-part Women at Risk awareness campaign for the Ministry of Health, Wellness and the Environment of St Vincent and the Grenadines, sponsored by the European Union. Source: Newsday, December 10, 2020

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