I bet Patrick Brown is probably the only one of the present group of writers for the stage in Jamaica who would dare to bring up the "befoe cockcrow, thou shalt deny me thrice" bit - hugely anachronistic - and get a laugh in a play whose theme revolves round Noah's building an ark to survive the flood. Noah's project happened hundreds of centuries before the betrayal in Gethsemane.

I saw the play Ras Noah and the Hawk fairly soon after it opened and I'm sure there hadn't been time enough to pay the repeat visits and memorise the dialogue as the CentreStage audiences are like to do.

This time, it was all engineered carefully to provide the onlookers with their verbal interplay. The atmosphere created was like that of a family worshipping together and staying together. I guess if somebody had started then and there a campaign of Oliver for prime minister, it would have gained enormous support

Oliver Samuels is on top form in the irascible role of the abrasive but likeable, much put upon provider of benefits who is always being shafted by those he has most carefully planned for. This time, it's his son who should have been qualifying in medicine abroad but who, it turns out, has been not many miles away on the slopes of Wareika enjoying the benefits of 'colley'.

Ras Noah is this son - played by Glenn Campbell in full spate, eyes goggling, mouth twisting and, in one sequence, bursting into spastic movement as the result of a collision with a motor car. It is only one of many misfortunes for Ras Noah stemming from the mistaken instructions given him by a 'sketel' angel who has a little trouble communicating clearly the commands of the deity.

The whole piece hangs around the growing lack of intelligent communication in our day-to-day speech. For a long time, it seems to me, Jamaican comedy turns have concentrated almost exclusively on the deterioration of language, malapropism and big words that the user doesn't understand .I suspect also

that dyslexia, more widespread than we think, plays an important role in what is going on round us.

Look back at the work of dialect writer Louise Bennett and think of all the pieces that revolve around mispronunciations or twangs that lead the mimicker into difficulties, Joan Andrea Hutchinson also leans heavily on the distortions of the would-be speaky-spokey and produces that gem of a monologue about the tourist guide at Rose Hall Great House who is well on the way to creating her own lingo.

One can only pray the guided gained something from the tour.
Jamaican public humour seems focussed relentlessly on what in better days would have been described as illiteracy and has tried its best to make it the only but - except, of course, for the sexual innuendo which is rampant and fairly crude as ever.

I think I have struck upon the central problem. We actually don't like to get things right and are loath to spend time on anything that might be thought difficult to achieve.

Dramatists like to keep up with where things are going in their 'society' and the very title of this play discloses where the humour lives and moves and has its being. Ras Noah is seen early on following the 'sketel's' instructions to build a chicken-wire cage for a hawk as instructed by the Almighty.

Slowly it dawns on the slower members of the audience. Say the word 'hawk' very slowly with a heavily ruptured dipthong and you'll get what Noah was meant to build.

God is a fairly friendly chap looking in this manifestation something like a cross between a sheep-dog and a polar bear, and h-u-g-e.

He comes from a CentreStage workshop along with a handful of others who launch into the madcap proceedings with great vigour and enthusiasm. Director Trevor Naine keeps the CentreStage family going at a fair clip.