A retired Trinidadian teacher, Albert Jordan, in Port of Spain, is the hero of Derek Walcott's "Remembrance."… He is a sardonic, humorous old man, bored and fed up, an "anachronism" in independent Trinidad, his head (and heart) crammed with English poetry, and still grief-stricken at the death of his elder son in a riot years before, when a British policeman's gun went off accidentally. A black man unable to feel a part of the black world, Jordan is yet too wise to feel at home in the British tradition. (p. 105)

"Remembrance" is a loosely constructed play (and none the worse for that), slowing and darkening as it proceeds. Its chief pleasures lie in its details and its lines. Mr. Walcott is a poet, and his writing is of a quality we seldom hear in the theatre. (p. 106)

Edith Oliver, "Displaced Person," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New...