Voices of Experience

recent presentations in Wales

Spending a day with over two hundred eight and nine year-olds confirmed two stereotypes of childhood; namely children of this age are capable of re-enacting the more violent episodes from Lord of the Flies at the drop of a Manchester United hat. Yet minutes later they can be transported to a very different and sceptred isle from which we adults are permanently exiled (model boats and aircraft kits aside) - that of magical innocence and extraordinary enthusiasm for make-believe and play. Fortunately during the recent performance of Theatr Gorllewin Morgannwg's homage to the age of steam railways in the south Wales valleys, Codi Stem/Full Steam Ahead, at Swansea's Dylan Thomas Theatre the members of the young audience conformed to the second im age of childhood, involving themselves whole heartedly in the lively and boisterously acted proceedings.

For this particular performance the company had linked up with Swansea Museum to provide a morning of exploring the city's collection of Victorian artifacts. This preparation along with the traditional "hot seating" of actors after the production to field the audience's questions offered the youngsters a full and interactive day. In the latter activity the sophisticated questioning about characterisation and choice of subject matter quashed yet another preconception about children; that they are all gawking and unquestioning members of the television generation. Indeed the children here displayed an awareness of performance and role play that was quite impressive.

At the base of productions such as Codi Stem and implicit in the kind of work the children were doing at Swansea Museum is the sentient that life was much harder and less pampered in the past, but very often more rewarding in its simplicity and lack of clutter. This was a time when a journey down the valley to Neath Fair was a long awaited outing and a trip to Swansea or Cardiff by steam train a much remembered experience.

In poet and illustrator Alan Perry's per formance for voices Music You Don't Normally Hear at Ty Llen (the Dylan Thomas Centre), there was very little to celebrate about the simple life. Distilled from Perry's fascinating and often disturbing collection of life histories of homeless people in contemporary Swansea, this series of duologues and monologues captured the often far from quiet desperation of the city's street dwellers, clinging to some extraordinary semblance of a comfortable home life at the very edge of existence.

Perry who gathered his material during his work with the Cyrenians Cymru hostel for the homeless chose to act out a number of roles himself along with fellow amateur actor and poet Peter Read and professional actress Angela Colderick. This mixture of amateur and professional works well; the seemingly untutored "naturalness" of Perry's and Read's delivery of other people's testimonies gave the individual histories credence and immediacy, whilst Colderick's more trained and highly intense style of acting imparted a certain harsh dignity to her two female characters coping with brutalisation, mental instability and the topsy turvy moral code at the bottom of the social pile. The play will be touring Wales this spring.

The ability to survive against the odds, alhough not in quite such perilous circumstances, underpinned BBC Wales's A Light in the Valley (broadcast in December 1998). Directed by Michael Bogdanov and with an initial script by Ian Rowlands, this celebration of Rhondda people owed much to the director's and dramatist's work for the stage. Bogdanov's experience of working with large scale amateur casts alongside professional actors was evident in the felicitous involvement of local people in the production as "the community". In contrast to such mass portrayal, what I presume was Rowlands' sharp ear for the glorious idiosyncrasies and often surreal inconsequentialities of Valleys talk gave life to individual characters.

Whilst the lives depicted in Music You Don't Normally Hear were immediate and forcefully dramatic in their deviance from everyday behaviours and certainties, the world of A Light in the Valley was a much more recognisable and frequently documented one of post-industrial, male despair at long-term unemployment with the disappearance of coal mining. This overfamiliarity with the subject matter posed difficulties with its dramatisation.

The more obviously staged episodes worked well such as actor Glyn Houston's masterly representation of the past spirit of the Rhondda through readings from Idris Davies, recollections of Communist allegiances (often argued out in Italian cafe's) and in tender kindness towards the youngest generation. Even more successful was the stirring procession of shadow miners seen to haunt the valley, looking for lost miners and gathering up the dead of the older mining generations. Alongside such poetic grandeur and magical realism, the central plot involving men in search of work in present day Rhondda seemed a rather predictable thing. Perhaps A Light in the Valley might have benefited from the inclusion of even more real lives and actual voices; individual stories told by local people and not actors, which may have produced less predictable scenarios than the ones depicted here.

A Light in the Valley centres on loss of a proud political tradition, work and masculine expectation, and even of the known certainties of a particular industrial landscape now transformed to heritage parks or put back to grass. Such absence of certainties was portrayed with great affection in the production whose executive producers were not surprisingly Phil George and Dai Smith. Affection, however, seems to be entirely missing from the coldly knowing dissection of the hard-boiled detective form And Nothing but the Truth on tour at present throughout Britain by VTOL Dance Company.

Director Mark Murphy, who has worked with Swansea's Volcano Theatre Company, interweaves his dancers fast, furiously and inventively within film sequences that, pace Paul Auster, purport to depict a murder that may or may not have happened. The truth may not be out there, and nothing is certain apart from the telling of stories which may be fabricated or not. A familiar post-modernist assertion, that is complemented by the enigmatic cinematic design and poundingly strenuous fragments of dance. Fine so far, but the company has added an additional layer of action in the shape of Gary Young's affectionless and cloth eared appropriation of a Chandleresque narrator.

And Nothing but the Truth well exceeds the RDA of a certain kind of postmodern knowingness. By way of contrast the dose of scepticism and hard-edged irony is very low in the other three productions I've discussed, perhaps making them humbler, less fashionable affairs. However, in their passionate concern with the often remarkable nature of ordinary lives, Codi Stêm, Music You Don't Normally Hear and A Light in the Valley all offered theatrical experiences that can allow us to store images of the human will to survive that may remain with us, rather than the empty gestures to wards a certain type of postmodern narrative in VTOL's production which can be very quickly fast-forwarded from memory.

author:Anna Marie Taylor

original source: Planet # 133 Feb/March 1999
01 February 1999