After Wayne moved from the UK back to Trinidad in the mid-90s to work at a local paper, he wasn’t sure where he wanted his career to go next. “My mum is mixed Trinidadian and Chinese, and my dad is English,” he says. “I was brought up in Trinidad but I’d been doing media studies in Sheffield.” As well as writing, he also loved acting, and would often perform in local productions.
In 1997, he was cast in a play called Jacques and His Master by Milan Kundera. That’s where he met Louris, a psychology student who was acting in her spare time to make extra money. “My first impression of Wayne was that he was funny,” she says. He was always pulling faces and making jokes.” Although they were both dating other people, they developed a friendship.
The show they were working on was set in 17th-century France and many scenes took place in a barn. “My character had to climb into the granary and we would always stay there chatting while we waited for our scenes,” says Wayne. The cast would also socialise together after rehearsals. “She was confident and popular. We stayed friends when the play was over. I got a job as a corporate copywriter and my office was near where she worked at a radio station as a production technician,” he says.
Callout
In 1999, Louris went to the UK for a gap year, to work in theatres and gain experience in production and acting. When she returned, she and Wayne were single. “I bumped into him in a bar and he invited me back to his place for a drink. That’s the night we got together,” she says. “I never expected to hear from him again, but he called me a few days later and asked me to go see a play with him.”
Realising how much they enjoyed each other’s company, they began dating but it wasn’t long before Wayne was headhunted for a job in St Lucia as the creative director of a marketing agency. Around the same time, Louris was offered a fellowship in theatre education and outreach in Washington DC. They agreed the distance would be too hard for them to continue a relationship, but they stayed in touch.
“At Christmas she invited me to DC. It was bitterly cold but we had such a great time,” says Wayne. In the new year, Louris told Wayne that she couldn’t face another DC winter and wanted to move home. “Instead of going back to Trinidad in the summer of 2001, he suggested I join him in St Lucia,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be with someone artistic. Wayne is also one of the most secure men I’d ever dated; he is so fun and very intelligent.”
She decided to give it a go and her temporary move became a two-year stay. “My mother was horrified. She was like: ‘You’re going to St Lucia to live with some man!?’” she laughs. But Louris soon realised she had made the right choice.
In 2003, they moved back to Trinidad where they got married and set up a theatre company together. They have two children, born in 2007 and 2014. As well as producing plays locally, they offered team-building and corporate theatre programmes until the pandemic slowed things down in 2020. Louris is now a programme manager for a major festival in Trinidad, while Wayne is a stay-at-home dad, as well as an actor and playwright. “I love Wayne’s sense of humour and how he has always supported me in everything,” she says. “In 2010, my mother fell ill and she died in 2014, just a week after my daughter was born. He helped me through all of that. I also suffered badly in pregnancy with severe hyperemesis gravidarum, and he did everything for me while I was unwell.”
Wayne says they both come from “family-oriented” backgrounds and share the same passion for theatre and the arts. “Louris is gorgeous but she’s also very supportive. We always find a way to talk about what we need and make it work.”
