The accidental settlement of Bermuda in 1609 helped to inspire “The Tempest”, an ageing William Shakespeare’s masterful farewell to the art and magic of the stage.In the play, a remote island is transformed into a transcendent metaphor for the enclosed world of the theatre; a world of illusion, fantasy and imagination where everything is possible and everyone is an actor possessed of “such stuff as dreams are made on.”Given this enduring cultural association between Bermuda and the theatre, it’s entirely appropriate this tiny island has a long tradition of producing outsize performers — those for whom all the world really is a stage.A century ago Ernest Trimingham, a Bermudian actor/writer resident in the United Kingdom, became the first black performer to appear regularly in British cinema. His play “Lily of Bermuda”, produced in Manchester in 1909, was the first black-themed musical-comedy ever staged in Britain.Mr. Trimingham lived long enough to cross paths with a young Earl Cameron when that aspiring Bermudian actor first began treading the boards in London’s West End theatre district at the outset of his distinguished career in the early 1940s.(“We called him ‘Trim’ but I didn’t know him well and it couldn’t have been his real name,” Mr Cameron recalled in a 1990s interview. “The Trimingham family in Bermuda were wealthy white people … The name Trimingham was everywhere in Bermuda. They owned a lot of property so Ernest must have taken his stage name from them.”)In the 1950s and ‘60s, of course, Mr Cameron became a household name in the United Kingdom. His crisp, polished and authoritative performances on the stage, in film and on TV helped to not only break but obliterate the colour bar in the British entertainment industry, eventually leading to a new era of colour-blind casting.The transformative nature of Mr Cameron’s contributions to his field have been recognised by both his adopted country (he was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2009) as well as in Bermuda, with the City Hall Theatre being named in his honour at a dedication ceremony he attended last December.One early beneficiary of Mr Cameron’s groundbreaking efforts was the late Michael Ebbin, a supremely talented Bermudian actor/dancer who worked regularly in London and on Broadway in the 1960s and ‘70s.And although he only ever appeared in a single movie, his performance as a sinuous and lethal voodoo priest cum assassin in the James Bond epic “Live And Let Die” ensured Mr Ebbin a certain measure of cinematic immortality.In recent years there has been an unprecedented flowering of talent in the performing arts, with any number of young Bermudians seeming to effortlessly erase the distance between ambition and accomplishment as they make their marks internationally (their achievements only appear to be effortless, of course; these artists are skilled at camouflaging all of the hard work and sweat equity that goes into their triumphs behind masks of cool assuredness).Bermudians Rebecca Faulkenberry and Nicholas Christopher are both currently appearing in hit Broadway shows, two of only a few hundred performers in New York with paying theatrical jobs; the vast majority of the ten thousand or so actors in that city usually earn their keeps waiting tables or parking cars.Mr Christopher’s younger brother, actor-singer Jonathan, is the current artist in residence at the Syracuse Opera in New York State and barnstorms the US Midwest in his spare time in well-received musical theatre productions.Daren Herbert is a working actor in Canada whose every fresh credit seems to be a new pearl strung onto the silken thread of his career. Jason Eddy is establishing an admirable reputation for himself in the UK as an actor of exceptional range, intelligence and virtuosity.And there are others, in fields ranging from music to dance to puppetry, who are equally aflame with talent and equally likely to establish international reputations for themselves.Former US President John F Kennedy once remarked that the arts, far from being a distraction in the life of a nation, are very close to the centre of a nation's purpose — and represent a test of the quality of a nation's civilisation.If that is so, then the abilities and skills of Bermuda’s new generation of performers, musicians and artists speaks to the exceptional quality of the stuff Bermuda’s culture is made on.