By the time she founded her influential and still thriving Talawa theatre company in 1986, Yvonne Brewster, who has died aged 87, had made waves in her native Jamaica as an actor and director, worked on British TV, run a small touring company, Carib, for black actors, and served for two years as a drama officer on the Arts Council.
She had good contacts and knew the ropes, and set about a dynamic programme of work – new plays and classics by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Shakespeare – often seen in the Tricycle (now the Kiln, in Kilburn), the Lyric Hammersmith and the Riverside Studios, all in London.
