| Challenging Questions about our Identity |
| [extended review - not the version that appeared in the Western Mail] |
At the Torch |
| Torch Theatre / Pembrokeshire Summer School - Figures in the Landscape , Torch Theatre, Milford Hanven , September 11, 2001 |
| This youth theatre project may be one you haven’t heard of - it’s new and hardly high profile - but it provided me with one of the most engaging and provocative pieces of theatre of the year. With the young cast of 15-20 year-olds looking as if they found it just as rewarding and stimulating, this collaboration between Pembrokeshire education department and the Torch Theatre is clearly a success. What director Andy Greenhouse, with his assistant Louise Bennett, have done is used the theatrical process to explore not just the essence of performance but its relationship to cultural identity and thus to the whole history of the development of new Welsh theatre. Inevitably that structure has come from someone who knows about the performance tradition in Wales rather than from the young participants - but it seems to me that the company have taken on board that intriguing hypothesis and very much made it their own interrogation. They ask questions about performative style but also about whether language makes a difference (an absurdist tramp scene that could be from Godot or Parry or Rowlands is played in English and then again in Welsh), about the vexed matter of where nostalgia, heritage, cliché and memory intermix (a mining-disaster scene that could be from a heritage museum display, How Green Was My Valley, Kitchener Davies or a worthy TIE show), about the obsession with family (a scene which could have come from Dylan Thomas, Gwyn Thomas or Ed Thomas !), about the place of contemporary youth culture (a neat dance number reminiscent of Volcano and Man Act and a reference to showbiz icon Shirley Bassey with a belting version of Hey Big Spender), and two final issues that Welsh theatre tends to duck - where do more recently-arrived ethnic communities fit in to this idea of Welshness (with an African singalong finale) and what about the English settlers, a real issue with more than half the cast born the other side of Offa’s Dyke. These questions get no answers, and that sense of openendedness and ambiguity gives the show a nice edge. At the centre is an Alice-in-Wonderland figure who finds herself on a stage that looks like a props cupboard shared by Paupers Carnival, Cardiff Lab and Brith Gof (there’s lots here for the oldies as well as youngsters !), the bewildered figure in the landscape of history and culture trying to find her identity; at the end it’s passionately-sung declaration from an English lad now living here who simply asks not to be stereotyped and to be allowed to be himself. There are bigger issues involved, of course, but if theatre is about raising debate then performers and audience here shared a head-spinning evening of unanswered questions from a constituency that doesn’t often get the opportunity to explore such fundamental problems like cultural identity. If they’d had six weeks rather than three, the product might have been truly amazing and I suspect we’d end up with more informed and researched questions - but still questions. Today there are no answers. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
This review has been read 2322 times There are 81 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
