Theatr y Byd |
| Theatr y Byd- New South Wales , , November 1, 1999 |
| "Where to, love?" Involuntarily, I mentally circle the grammatical mistake in the margin of my consciousness. A by-product of taxi driving seems to be astute telepathy because, having sensed my subliminal pedantry, all taxi drivers, without fail, pointedly ignore me for the duration of the journey. Unlike the taxi driver in Ian Rowlands' play New South Wale,,; (though perhaps he hadn't been similarly psychically irritated), who is the archetypal bigoted Laahndaahn motor-mouth cabbie, a hackneyed) driver in both senses of the term, whose opinions make Jeremy Clarkson seem positively liberal and whose homily about birds and bushes is, shall we say, not entirely traditional. He is brilliantly played by Tony Longhurst who has previously played; yes you've guessed it, a taxi driver in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch alongside Colin Firth (he of the thigh-huggingly tight breeches in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice). Playing taxi drivers is evidently Longhurst's vocation in life. All the details are spot-on, from the way he holds his cigarette, to the authentic costume of polyester slacks, short sleeved shirt, thin gold chain and Delboy- style signet rings, to the burgeoning beer belly and slightly sweaty underarms (though the latter two could just be a happy coincidence). Longhurst's obstreperous cabbie picks up Alex (played by ex-teenage Gwent-boy Scott Bailey), a young Welshman who has apparently been backpacking and odd-jobbing in Australia, outside Paddington at 2.00 a.m. Unlike Dannie Abse's more famous returning native, Alex has missed the last train for his return to Cardiff. As the journey progresses, the two characters develop a rapport. Ironically, the taxi driver has always wanted to travel, so Alex regales him with stories (tall ones, as it turns out) of his escapades Down Under. For both men Australia represents freedom and adventure, a Promised Land, a Xanadu, having superseded Ed Thomas's America (now seen as "too real, too close for comfort") as the land of opportunity. When Alex eventually confesses the deception and admits that he has, in fact, never been to Australia, the fantasy collapses like a house of cards. A kind of theatrical football, the play is a game of two halves, not in the sense of a literal interval or a break for orange segments, but in the way that each of the two characters appropriates the dominant voice when on his own territory. In the first half the taxicab travels from England to Wales and the driver maintains an almost incessant monologue, punctuated only by the occasional murmur of assent from his passenger. When they reach Cardiff Bay, however, and the two men get out of the cab, the Welshman secures the conversational ball; he is on home turf now, here he has a voice. This is meaningful because the (non-events occur in the early hours of the day of the Welsh devolution vote, that vote being a privilege for which Alex has paid a fare of nigh on £200 (more than a hint of dramatic irony here when we recall that nearly half of the electorate in Wales didn't vote when the polling station was on their doorsteps). The journey motif, then, with its necessary traversal of boundaries, borders and bridges, takes on a direct political significance. The trip occurs throughout the night, representing the dark ages of Welsh political subjugation by Westminster, but, as Alex reaches home to vote for devolution, the dawn breaks, heralding a new political era for Wales. The crudeness of this symbolism, however, is tempered by our knowledge of the unconvincing outcome of the referendum, so that whilst Rowlands pronounces the sense of renewal and hope that devolution represents for so many people in Wales, he also implicitly acknowledges the very tangible resistance to his dramatic change in the political landscape. The future remains uncertain; Wales remains "schizophrenic territory". As Alex wryly notes, "The only thing the Welsh can agree upon is what they're not - not English." The play does end on a note of optimism, however, not only with the coming of dawn but with the reinterpretation of the title, the realization that, for Alex at least, the Promised Land is no longer to be found on the other side of the world: the new, devolved South Wales has become his personal New South Wales. And if that's mildly cheesy, so be it. For me, a forward-looking, hopeful and witty play, which intelligently examines issues pertinent to Welsh life but is not obsessed with self-identity like a recurrent nervous cultural twitch, is to be welcomed. The PA system blared out the Manics' "Australia" as the two actors took their bows and 1 was reminded of the last time 1 was at the Sherman as part of a much larger audience, to see a very different play set in South Wales: a melodramatic grotesque study of the Welsh. The difference is that Ian Rowlands is a real playwright with real talent, rather than the brother of somebody famous. |
Reviewed by: Claire Powell |
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