Chester Sam­bra­no

Vet­er­an Caribbean play­wright An­tho­ny “Tony” Hall is be­ing de­scribed as a man who de­vot­ed his life to the arts.

Hall passed away yes­ter­day morn­ing af­ter suf­fer­ing a heart at­tack.

Still in shock over the pass­ing of his for­mer col­league Christo­pher Laird said, “Hall was a vi­tal com­rade for half a cen­tu­ry and a lot of what Banyan (Ltd) is (now), is due to him and his tal­ent and his mind and it’s a loss that we all will have to bear.”

Se­nior lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies De­part­ment of Cre­ative and Fes­ti­val Arts Rawle Gib­bons joined in mourn­ing the loss of his co-work­er and friend.

Hall was teach­ing a Cre­ative Arts course at UWI and co-or­di­nat­ed an ex­change pro­gramme for stu­dents at Trin­i­ty Col­lege in Mass­a­chu­setts.

“He was the key fig­ure in the Na­tion­al Dra­ma As­so­ci­a­tion. He es­tab­lished the play­wright’s work­shop which meets the first Wednes­day of every month. The whole point of that was to en­cour­age and de­vel­op new writ­ing,” Gib­bons said.

He added that Hall “was al­ways think­ing of how to ad­vance Caribbean the­atre. That’s what he de­vot­ed his life to.”

When asked by Guardian Me­dia about the void cre­at­ed by Hall’s pass­ing, Gib­bon said, “It is a ques­tion of com­mit­ment. Tony comes from a gen­er­a­tion where one en­gaged in the arts out of sheer love of it, not for re­wards or con­tracts. It was a gen­er­a­tion that re­spond­ed to a his­tor­i­cal mo­ment. The Caribbean had to be staged and we were part of that.”

Gib­bons re­vealed that up to this past week­end Hall was meet­ing with co-cre­ators to de­vel­op plans to ad­vance the­atre even in this time of the pan­dem­ic and had de­vel­oped an on­line pro­gramme on Caribbean the­atre in re­cent weeks.

Hall was born in Port-of-Spain and at­tend­ed Na­pari­ma Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do. He gained a Bach­e­lor’s de­gree in dra­ma and ed­u­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Al­ber­ta (1969-73), Ed­mon­ton, Cana­da and ob­tained a diplo­ma in film and ad­vanced tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion.

Hall was a pi­o­neer in com­mu­ni­ty tele­vi­sion in the Caribbean. With the video pro­duc­tion house Banyan Lim­it­ed, in T&T, he was part of a group of artists who cre­at­ed in­dige­nous soap op­eras, TV dra­mas and cur­rent af­fairs pro­grammes in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.