| Extremism exposed amid the comedy and controversy |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Franco's Bastard , Chapter Arts Centre , April 16, 2002 |
| "CARDIFF isn't really Wales - it's a place all to itself." It's precisely this attitude - casually aired by the cab driver taking me to the city's Chapter Arts Centre - that enrages Carlo, the fascistic Welsh nation-builder at the heart of Dic Evans's coarsely enjoyable, controversy-stirring satire Franco's Bastard. Posing as an illegitimate son of the Spanish dictator, Carlo is disgusted as much by the political apathy of his fellow Welshmen as he is by the imperialist English, whose accursed influence he wishes to scrub out by military means. Imagine his joy, then, when he is introduced to a young man called Ben, who, he is told, has fled his job in a Cardiff fish suppliers' after decapitating his English boss with a three-foot frozen salmon. "I love this boy!" he exclaims. Carlo is modelled quite openly on Julian Cayo Evans, the self-styled leader of the Free Wales Army, whose minor-league terrorist activities resulted in an 18-month prison sentence in 1969, timed, so it was said, to coincide with Prince Charles's investiture. Given that Evans died in 1995, you could say that Edwards, who knew the man, has left it rather late to lampoon his pretensions. Certainly, you need to know more than the programme notes tell you to get all the references: like Evans, James Coombes's Carlo struts around a rustic mansion to martial music, wears a green tunic (claimed to be Franco's) and a bandana, and talks fondly of the Appaloosa horses he breeds out back. Even if some of the jokes are recondite, no audience member should have difficulty recognising the contentious relevance of the material, which identifies and sends up Welsh insecurities to the hilt, while sounding a loud warning shot about attempted remedies. Carlo's insistence that "the only way you can convince the English of democratic values is by bombing them" has an all-too-contemporary simple-mindedness, while recent reports that the BNP is setting up a Welsh branch find their correlative in Carlo's inability to work out how his Jamaican lover (Karin Diamond) fits into his vision of a new Wales. Admittedly, the play's structure is more ramshackle than an abandoned colliery, but Simon Harris's perky production for Sgript Cymru embraces its slapdash charm. James Coombes - a camply preening Carlo - with Shane Attwooll as his psychotic sidekick, Seon, and Adam Randall as the reluctant insurgent Ben, are certain to raise smiles and not a few hackles. |
Reviewed by: Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph |
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