| A classic in the making |
At Hijinx Theatre |
| Hijinx Theatre- The Long Way Home , Sherman Theatre Cardiff , October 7, 2007 |
This review first appeared in the Western MailCharlie Way, Wales’s most successful playwright, is basically a storyteller. But like all good storytellers, he knows that the best stories are not only the simplest but those that touch the soul and reach inside the audience’s archetypal memory. And so it is with The Long Way Home, possibly the quintessential Charlie Way. It’s the latest show from Hijinx Theatre and just the thing to enable the company to hit top form again. The show is touring Wales and England until December, by when it will almost certainly have developed into a classic. I refer to Mr Way as our most successful playwright because he has won umpteen awards, has seen most of his works published and always seems to have a play in production somewhere (his On The Black Hill, for example, is also on the road and playing Welsh venues in the next few weeks, and he has written The Sherman’s Christmas show): he has honed his craft to perfection (even though he is still capable of slips – witness The Last Pirate, a recent dire flop). Many of these acclaimed plays are ostensibly aimed at young audiences but especially of late the surface narrative hides depths that resonate with anyone who is prepared to listen: The Long Way Home, for example, is a story told by a couple who introduce it just as they would any tale and which is seemingly little more than the journey of an old woman and the wild boy she finds and takes with her from the mountains to the sea. But journeys are always more than mere travels, they are voyages of discovery, rites of passage, odysseys – and the working-out of the personal quandaries of the author. And here the journey goes right back to the heart of humanity – partly because it is set in Greece, the cradle of European culture, partly because it is about youth and age, partly because it is concerned with the search for identity, crucially because it is about forgiveness, sacrifice, love and redemption. That the old woman is called Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth, is a clue; that she teaches her adopted son to speak; that she has learned to negotiate life and threats to life; that she speaks to the ghost of her husband and in the afterlife can help him atone; that she somehow also represents all those old women dressed in black who signify the past in a reformulated Europe; these make her more than a character in a familiar folktale. All this in the simple story of a woman who just wants to see the sea again, the small village where she was born, and who finds herself lumbered with a feral abandoned boy as they encounter distraught parents, incompetent bandits, macho farmers and those who survive in contemporary Greece by catering to tourists ? Yes, although it’s what they call a slow burner: it takes a while to reveal its different layers, with opening scenes that could be from a theatre-in-education show, but excellent performances from Alex Alderton (who singing was out of this world), John Norton, Zoe Davies and Darren Stokes, under the direction of Louise Osborn, with music by James Williams, build up into an affecting climax. Stick with it and I guarantee you will by the end be fighting back the tears and, even if you can’t quite articulate it, you’ll know that this is about more than a simple story of an old woman and her adopted son. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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