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Gary Owen's new play The Shadow of a Boy in rehearsal at the National Theatre |
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SATURDAY night, small town Wales, one pub, one party and three lads stuck with their school reputations - the gimp, the geek and the bully. Their dream - to get the hell out. With a dead cat stuffed through a letterbox, a soupçon of mindless violence and the perfect girl to die for, Gary Owen's Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco bristled with the desperately ordinary, the truly extraordinary, and the just plain mad. Heroic and comic, his first stage play was a fierce blend of heroics and brutality. His second offering, The Shadow of a Boy, which is now in rehearsal with the National Theatre, is altogether softer. Owen says he wanted to write something "without any bad guys in it", but it has lost none of its edge in the writing. When Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco toured Wales last year, Owen was "under the naive impression that everyone would love it". But seen through the eyes of three rather dysfunctional working class lads who are bedfellows with violence, mental instability and an over-whelming desire to escape small-town life, it wasn't an immediately approachable piece of work. "I got hate mail," he admits. "One woman demanded her money back, so in the end I sent it to her myself as I couldn't write for days after I got her letter." It is this sensibility, mixed with a blast of brilliant, painful theatrical writing, straight from the heart of postmodern Wales, that makes Owen a remarkable talent. His second stage play is as captivating, incredible energy again being displayed by all his characters. "It's really different to my last play," says Owen, who says he started to write to get off the dole. "It's set in West Wales, where I lived before moving to Bridgend when I was about seven, and it's about a young boy and his nan. "They really love each other, but sometimes, when people are from different intellectual worlds, sometimes they can collide." Writing didn't come easy for Owen, who says that it took him years to hone a skill that is now reaping critical praise. He subscribes to the Martin Amis theory of writing - "that everyone has about a quarter-of-a-million words of **** in them and you have to keep on writing until you've used them all up" - and is comfortable with this "trial and error" mode of creativity. "It's an exciting time to be writing in Wales now," he says. "There's not much money in writing for theatre so we are not doing it for that. I suppose we're doing it out of love." The Shadow of a Boy can be seen at the National Theatre in London from June. Owen hopes to tour the production to Wales later in the year. |
| Western Mail arts pages web site: icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0900entertainment/0050artsnews/page.cfm?objectid=11874143&method=full&siteid=50082 |
| Hannah Jones e-mail: |
Thursday, May 16, 2002 |
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