''At What A Price'' is a play by Jamaican feminist and writer

Una Marson Una Maud Victoria Marson (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965) was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes. She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC, d ...

. It was co-written with her friend Horace Vaz in 1931 when Marson was 26 and first performed in

Jamaica Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At , it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, west of Hispaniola (the is ...

in 1932, the play was successful enough for Marson to travel to London on the profits where it would be staged at the

Scala Theatre The Scala Theatre was a theatre in Charlotte Street, London, off Tottenham Court Road. The first theatre on the site opened in 1772; the last was demolished in 1969, after a catastrophic fire. From 1865 to 1882, the theatre was known as the ...

on Charlotte Street in January 1934. in Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader Selected Papers from the Twenty third Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf ed. Wussow, H., and Gillies, M. A. Other performances in London included at the

YWCA The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) is a nonprofit organization with a focus on empowerment, leadership, and rights of women, young women, and girls in more than 100 countries. The World office is currently based in Geneva, Swit ...

Central Hall on

Great Russell Street Great Russell Street is a street in Bloomsbury, London, best known for being the location of the British Museum. It runs between Tottenham Court Road (part of the A400 route) in the west, and Southampton Row (part of the A4200 route) in the e ...

on 23 November 1933. This performance featured an all Black cast, and was described by

Harold Moody Harold Arundel MoodyDavid A. Vaughan''Negro Victory: The Life Story of Dr Harold Moody'' London: Independent Press, 1950. (8 October 1882 – 24 April 1947) was a Jamaican-born physician who emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he campaigned ...

as "the first time anything of the kind has been done by an amateur group." Marson herself performed in the production at the Scala Theatre which was staged by civil-rights organisation

The League of Coloured Peoples The League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) was a British civil-rights organisation that was founded in 1931 in London by Jamaican-born physician and campaigner Harold Moody with the goal of racial equality around the world, a primary focus being on bl ...

. It was the first all Black production in London's West End which is more usually identified as

Toussaint Louverture François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (, ) also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda (20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803), was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. During his life, Louvertu ...

by C.L.R. James but which was not performed until 1936. Marson is also the first Black female playwright to have had her work performed in the West End, which contemporary British Theatre credits to Natasha Gordon for her 2018 play '' Nine Night.'' In its depiction of the exploitation of a naive young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside, the four act play explores themes of women's desire, interracial relations and sexual harassment in the workplace. The only known surviving manuscript is in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection at the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

Plot

Ruth Maitland is a young black woman from the countryside who travels to the Jamaican capital

Kingston Kingston may refer to: Places * List of places called Kingston, including the six most populated: ** Kingston, Jamaica ** Kingston upon Hull, England ** City of Kingston, Victoria, Australia ** Kingston, Ontario, Canada ** Kingston upon Thames, ...

to find work. She finds a job as a stenographer and is seduced by her employer, a white British man named Gerald Fitzroy by whom she falls pregnant. At the end of the play Ruth is back in rural Jamaica where she is proposed to by a long term admirer called Rob.

References

{{Reflist Black theatre 1931 plays