At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Cymru Fach , Chapter , Cardiff , March 14, 2006 |
The audience loved it. The critics and at least some fellow professionals hated it.A not unfamiliar situation, especially for Welsh-language theatre - but it would be unfair to suggest that the language is the problem, a problem exacerbated, or at least not helped, by the use of surtitles for non-fluent Welsh speakers in Sgript Cymru’s latest production. When surtitles seem the norm in other countries (I’m just back from a theatre festival in Turin where every show was translated into two languages without problems through surtitles) I don’t see why it’s such a big deal in Wales – but of course it wasn’t just the surtitling I write as an Anglophone member of the audience but I suspect that in the case of William Owen Roberts's Cymru Fach, it is not that it is too wordy or that the attack on corruption is too knowing, but that it is too shallow and culturally-specific a piece of work for any translation technique to render acceptable. And the translation technology in this case was actually a bar – I was not the only one to find the surtitles, at one moment translated dialogue, the next edited reported-speech summaries, alienating its audience. Cymru Fach is based on Arthur Schnitzler's notorious turn-of-the-century shocker Reigen, better known as La Ronde, or even The Blue Room, the recent adaptation that had a naked Nicole Kidman getting critics slavering, a critique of the uses and abuses of sexual desire developed by the neat technique of short scenes where the second of two characters becomes the main one in the subsequent scene. In Roberts's version, the satire soon becomes fixated on the murky world of Welsh media and politics with characters like a member of the Welsh Language Board, a would-be Principal of Aberystwyth Uni, an AM, a soon-to-be-ennobled MP, a tv director, an ex-rock musician and so on - all obviously recognisable parodies. Apart from the satisfaction of recognition, this just isn't very funny or clever, to outsiders at least. To anyone beyond Offa’s Dyke it would be unintelligible regardless of the language - a series of petty sitcoms that has little larger relevance to issues of morality or exploitation, delivered in a dated farcical style. There is, of course, a case for an indigenous theatre that is exclusively by, for and about its own cultural community. But the best of such localised work transcends the particulars to make statements about broader humanity, or at least offers an original perspective on its own society. I would say that the plays of Ed Thomas and Ian Rowlands, for example, are specifically Welsh - but speak to a far wider audience in their examination of identity and the collision between the personal and the political. Roberts here seems to have no such ambition and, in fact, offers a view of Wales that is pessimistic as well as parochial and superficial. Small wonder, perhaps, that one prominent Welsh-speaking playwright was incandescent with rage after the show – but, I guess, such is the conspiracy of silence about the quality of Welsh theatre that critical voices from within the practice will not be heard by those that need to listen. Elen Bowman’s direction was fine, as you would expect, and the acting was all it could be given the script: a series of sexy ladies from a prostitute to politicians (whatever the difference) from Ffion Dafis, arrogant self-serving men from a soldier to a Lord from Gwyn Vaughan-Jones, a couple of female faux-innocents from Sara Lloyd and two incompetents from Sion Pritchard, all comic caricatures – but all more familiar, as is the play itself, as elements of television comedy rather than theatre. All are actors capable of a lot better than this. Audiences may well love it but as long as Welsh-language theatre is ring-fenced economically, ideologically and critically, I fear it will find it difficult to speak to the larger world, with or without surtitles. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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