At the Sherman |
| Sherman Theatre Company- Merlin and the Cave of Dreams , Sherman Theatre Company , November 25, 2005 |
| This review first appeared in the Western Mail.... The stories of Arthur and Merlin, with or without Camelot, the Round Table and the Holy Grail, are Wales’s great gift to Western European mythology. Much embroidered by Continental writers, the legends are known in the British Isles, France, German, Italy and wider afield. They have been woven into everything from the secrets of the tarot to the da Vinci code, from the Knights Templars to the Golden Dawn. The presidency of John Kennedy in the States was known as Camelot. All thanks to Welsh storytellers and a twelfth-century monk who incorporated the tales into a fictional history of Britain. And yet despite the Celtic origins recent Welsh playwrights seem to have ignored this rich source – until now, when we have two chances to see how Arthurian Romance stories can bet retold, adapted and embellished. Lewis Davies’s Spinning the Round Table, a modern take on Arthurian Romance that's all about New Labour politics while sticking fairly faithfully to the story of Arthur and Guinevere, her affair with Lancelot and the scheming of Modred, is touring small-scale theatres. Charles Way’s Merlin and the Cave of Dreams owes more to the original folk stories and is The Sherman Theatre's big Christmas show. The Matter of Britain, as it’s known, has long been a subject of our culture, whether transformed to Wagner or Hollywood’s Camelot, with scores of poems, novels, plays and films drawing on the legends. In the last century there was T H White’s The Once and Future King and Sword in the Stone. The nineteenth century has Lord Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (a copy of which the modern-day Arthur gives his wife as a present in Spinning the Round Table). In Elizabethan times Spenser’s Faerie Queen draws on Arthurian Romance to flatter his monarch, as did playwrights and poets in succeeding centuries. Before then one of the first books ever to be printed, by William Caxton in 1485, was Thomas Malory's Mort Darthur, a collection of earlier stories that was to become the standard source for our knowledge of Arthurian Romance. The most comprehensive telling of the tales comes from medieval Europe, however, where the idea of chivalry was invented by writers like the French Robert Wace, Chretien de Troyes and Robert de Borron, Germans Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg and Hertman von Aue and Italian Bleheris, in the process inventing what’s known as Arthurian Romance. Robert Wace’s was in fact a French verse version of the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely popular Historia Regum Brittanniae of 1136, now regarded as the most influential literary work ever to come out of Wales. A few years after his “History” Geoffrey, a Welsh speaker, wrote a less popular Life of Merlin that owed even more to traditional Welsh folk stories that had been around for centuries, incorporating traditions about Myrddin, the wild man of the woods. The tales that were to be collected in The Mabinogion, although probably recorded as late as the fourteenth century, predate Geoffrey’s fictionalised history (where Arthur is only one in a line of kings who allegedly created the British nation – starting with the Roman Brutus and including King Lear) and the chivalric Continental versions. In the tenth century, Culhwch and Olwen and old poems from the period of the Cynfeirdd talk about Arthur. Welsh and Breton minstrels would have spread the folklore to mainland Europe. However, the tales told by the professional wandering storytellers were not about knights but mythical characters we recognise from folklore. It was Wace who brought in the Round Table, Chretien de Troyes introduced Lancelot and Guinivere’s affair, Percival and the love of Enid and Geraint, and sited the court at Camelot, de Borron introduced the legend of the Holy Grail and Layamon, a Worcestershire priest, brought in the fairies at Arthur’s birth and their carrying him to Avalon at his death. Oh, and Monty Python brought in the coconuts. Today Arthurian Romance has become an inspiration to generations of occultists, a basis for gamers and a key source for a whole range of esoteric obsessives, New Age dreamers, geeks and anoraks. The New Matter of Britain, as it was dubbed when it became fashionable in the late 1960s, was part of the quasi-religious fascination with ley-lines, UFOs, magic and the paranormal that was to morph into New Ageism – and shifted the epicentre from Wales to Glastonbury, the destination of The Grail Trail. Frankly, you can suggest almost anything relating to Arthurian Romance ands make it fit. The Holy Grail was a flying saucer. The Knights of the Round Table were thinly disguised Knights Templar. Arthur discovered America... all seriously-made proposals. I should know because I'm an Arthurian Romance junky - I have shelves of books on it and an unfinished novel (don't ask) ! Arthur, of course, probably was a real warrior, maybe not necessarily Celtic – though a recent book does claim to prove that he was Welsh, a fifth-century king of Powys, Owain Ddanthwyn. The scene of the battle in he was mortally wounded, Camlann, is usually accepted as Cornwall’s River Camlan, but may be the Maes Camlan that is a few miles east of Dolgellau or Camlan hill in Cwm Cerist in north-west Wales. Merlin may also have been real, and Welsh, but a Bard rather than a magician - although possibly not born in Carmarthen, a legend that may have been invented to explain the place name rather than the other way about. Merlinus, and hence Merlin, is how Geoffrey of Monmouth translated Myrddin - because the French readers might deem that the name was just a bit too close to a (still popular) expletive, merde ! Both Spinning the Round Table and Merlin and the Cave of Dream show how the stuff of myth is both enduring and useful as a framework for storytelling in any context. For Lewis Davies, it's a convenient metaphor for contemporary politics, for Charles Way, it's a familiar peg on which to hang a story of growing up. Davies sticks pretty closely to one of the basic storylines, that of the gallant and upright Lancelot's affair with the fragrant Guinevere In Spinning the Round Table, Arthur is a Blair figure in a government defined by the media manipulation of Morgan (an amalgam of the traitor Modred and Arthur’s fairy sister Morgan le Fey) but the infidelity of two of its cleanest members (Lawrence-Lancelot and Gwen-Guinevere) does not result in chaos but in Arthur's renewed ambition. No Merlin, oddly, though many versions of the myth made Merlin the real power behind the throne. Is the play political satire ? Or simply a retelling, with tweaking, of the legend ? You decide: Hijinx's production tours Wales until December 10, when it ends at Hijinx’s home, the Wales Millennium Stadium. Charles Way's play, in truth, owes very little to Arthurian Romance but more to the Celtic folklore tradition upon which the tales of chivalry were based. There’s Arthur, there’s Excalibur and Avalon, and Uther Pendragon and Igraine, and Rita Gawr, and the sources for Merlin and the Cave of Dreams is more Culhwch and Olwen than any of the Norman writers. Way’s Arthur, the hero of the play, is a boy and the play is in some way a rites-ofpassage story. But, then, all folktales are about dealing with the problems of real life, creating fables that resonate deeply within us. Most of Charles Way’s plays (and he’s written more than any other writer in Wales) are timeless stories, many based on folklore and legend. In the past he’s drawn on Greek mythology, Russian folk tales, Hans Christian Andersen and The Bible, for example, and it’s hardly surprising that this most gifted of playwrights should now look to the very Celtic tradition of Arthur and Merlin – and, like all those before him, give it some original tweaks. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
This review has been read 2973 times There are 94 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
