Having excelled at theatre, film and tourism, Gem...
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the Theatre Guild in 1978, she was the producer and she was encouraged to join the Theatre Guild.
Born in Aucklyne, Corentyne, Madhoo-Nascimento attended Aucklyne Primary School and Corentyne High School, now JC Chandisingh Secondary School. When the family moved from Aucklyne in 1968 to Britannia on the West Coast Berbice she stayed in Aucklyne to finish her secondary education.
Once she had completed high school, her father encouraged her to become a teacher like two of her older sisters. “I vowed I would never become a teacher. I incurred my parents’ wrath for months on end because I wasn’t getting a job,” she recalled.
Eventually she moved to Georgetown where she stayed with a cousin. She sent out several job applications without success. “I even worked as a store attendant and lasted for one week. Cutting a long story short, I went to see an uncle who was a high-profile person in the government at the time. That was how I got the job at GNCB,” she stated.
She was a teller at the counter for three years and felt she did an excellent job. “Even though I was very efficient at what I had to do, the promotion didn’t come. Even when my supervisor - who always said I was the best staff he had in the department - was absent and I took charge, still for years I didn’t get a promotion as a supervisor,” she said.
World tour
After several years at GNCB, MadhooNascimento had accumulated six months of outstanding leave. As a 25 year-old she decided to spend her savings travelling the world. “My mother was horrified when I told her what I was doing,” she recalled.
When she lived in Aucklyne, some nights, she and her older sisters would climb through a window and place a mattress on top of the zinc roof that covered the kitchen which was an extension to the house. Lying there, they would talk about what they wanted to do when they grew up, while admiring the moon and skimming the skies for pitching meteors.
“My older sister who has since passed away, always said, ‘when you see a pitching star make a wish’,” she recalled. That sister’s repeated wish was to travel the world.
Her family had a globe and they used to discuss various countries. “That and my sister’s wish had an influence on me wanting to travel. The first opportunity I got was this long leave and I decided to travel. I took my savings to the travel agent and said I wanted to see how far this money would take me. We had friends and family in various places and I wrote to everybody asking who had who, in this and that country. I travelled as a single 25 to 26 year-old Guyanese Indian woman which probably never happened before, even hitchhiking in some places,” she reminisced. “I went through Europe by rail from France to Holland going down to Italy, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Switzerland. I travelled cheaply staying with relatives and friends, at pension houses, at YWCA accommodations where you paid a dollar a night. In
Egypt, India and Greece I stayed with family. I went to Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan. I couldn’t get a US visa and so I went to Mexico, Costa Rica and back to Guyana. I was in Spain when my leave was up, but I still had all these tickets booked and so I travelled for eight months.”
On her return to Guyana she found a job in the insurance business.
“I wasn’t happy with an eight-to-four job to be honest. I wanted to have flexible hours on the job. Insurance worked well for me for a while, until we started the Theatre Company,” she said.
Professional theatre
Madhoo-Nascimento and director, actor, broadcaster Ron Robinson started the Theatre Company, which was a legally registered company, on 1st November, 1981.
“We introduced professional theatre in this country making it a business. Prior to that, theatre was all voluntary. I was also in the business management side of things because of my background in banking and accounts. We had a legal contract for payment drawn up by a law firm that was signed by everyone who was in a production, for payment from revenue earned from the production,” she said.
The Theatre Company toured the Caribbean and the USA between 1982 and 2002 to stage shows. “No other theatrical company had done this before in Guyana. In Guyana, we also gave part proceeds from our opening nights to charity,” she said.
“Over the years I’ve produced and coproduced roughly 300 productions. I don’t think anyone else has ever done that in this country.”
When she left the Theatre Company after 20 years, as the primary producer, she had done about 150 productions.
She produced Dave Martins musical, “All in One” which was sponsored by GT&T for the country’s 40 th independence anniversary.
The Theatre Company also staged Dave Martins’ “Raise Up” in1990. The Ministry of Education had commissioned him to stage it in 1988 for the 100th anniversary of Indian immigration to Guyana and African emancipation from slavery.
“Dave said to me and Ron he had ‘Raise Up’ that he had done so much research into and the ministry had done nothing with it. He asked us if we would like to produce it and we did it in 1990,” she said. “We took the group of actors and the musical director to the Cayman Islands and to eight states of the USA on a onemonth tour performing at universities. We had slide projections showing the conditions under slavery and indentureship. In Cleveland, Mississippi, before the intermission a number of White lecturers walked out of the theatre. We went to Michigan State University, New York, Virginia, Miami. Washington DC. ‘Raise Up’ was a historic production.”
Madhoo-Nascimento co-founded Prime Time Advertising Agency which was the first to have a video production studio in Guyana. She took part in the