| A Comedy Natural |
Theatre Event |
| Mike Parker-A (Very) Rough Guide to Wales , Machynlleth Comedy Festival , May 6, 2013 |
A late news item in April reported Britain’s least-used rail station as hosting fourteen passengers a year. That is Times Square compared with the lines that run through marginal constituencies in Wales and have thus eluded the Treasury’s kindly attention. Mike Parker got to ride the Heart of Wales line in the course of researching his book “Real Powys.” The conductor told him he was the third passenger he had ever picked up at Sugar Loaf Halt. That must be three times the number who pack out Dfyi Junction. Dyfi Junction features in Mike Parker’s seventy minute, genre-straddling, talk-gig homage to the place he has made his home for the last fifteen years. The title of Parker’s last book was “Map Addict”. He adores them. He has pored over this Western end of the former Montgomeryshire and discovered that the old kingdoms of Deheubarth and Brycheiniog met at…Dyfi Junction. The station, with its bizarre half-kilometre long platform and thirty lights, has already been celebrated on Youtube. Parker adds his own tribute with an irreverent self-created postcard. Parker’s show relies solely on voice, personality and a series of home-generated slides. He starts with maps, and moves to adverts and Street View shots. He bisects Britain with the old line from Severn to Wash that has been the prosperity fault line for seven hundred years: “South of the line a bag of money. North of the line…”- he can do the timing- “a bag of chips.” He lightly touches on skirmishes of old. Prestatyn really did not go for the first edition of the Rough Guide. It could be said that it is a brave man who later walks into the town’s tourist office to announce he is there to do research for an update. But it makes a great story for a live audience. His first image is borrowed from the Wales Tourist Board, daffodils, a castle that looks like Dolwyddelan, and entirely bereft of people. The tourism promoters may be an easy target. Parker drops backpacks and surfboards across a string of Wales’ nicest places, but he is not averse to retitling Abersoch as “Cheshire-on-Sea.” He points out that the promoters stuck with “Europe’s youngest capital”, daft in the first place, even while very real capitals like Pristina and Podgorica emerged onto the map of Europe. He resuscitates the EU document that scissored out Wales entirely and the beer advert that relocated Wales to a balmy spot between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. But the point about “A (Very) Rough Guide to Wales” is that Parker loves every square foot of the place. He respects the beautifully kept garden that fronts the most modest of Rhondda terraces. He finds delight in a pebble-dash Anglesey village where the double yellow lines are the brightest feature going. He admires the sheer solidity of the former Conservative Club in Tylerstown. And there is entertainment. A Carmarthenshire Southfork has a swimming pool with water a deep-stained green. He finds the tiniest of bus shelters with a turnstile, and asks the question “why?” (There is an answer.) He comes across a picture of the shop “the Welsh Lovespoon Centre” where the last seven letters have been blurred into unreadability. Parker has fun and enjoys a joke, but it is not the slash-and-burn of the sometime comedy scene. The context- and crucially his audience knows it- is a relationship that he has entered into for life. “A (Very) Rough Guide to Wales” is more than knock-about for a festival of comedy. Emotion intrudes, as in the dismay that the last mile of the A470, Lloyd George Avenue, has so far turned out to be less Champs d’Elysees than the old East Berlin. Parker knows a thing or two about the culture. Not for nothing does the twenty-year resident of Gwynedd make him wince when he pronounces his adopted county as in “horrid” and “florid.” Harri Webb and Raymond Williams, Iwan Bala and the photographer Maciej Dakowicz all feature. Parker’s background in journalism has given him an eye for the detail that counts, and his background as an author the discipline to cut and shape. His gig ends with a great punch line. Towards the end he switches from visual material to a series of tweets from Pontyberem. They would be better gone; tweets are easy, and they were never intended for this level of exposure long after the moment of their writing Machynlleth’s rugby club is a three-mile trip down the valley from home. Mike Parker is a natural. “The Very Rough Guide to Wales” is infinitely adaptable for local audiences and well fit to tour. A whole second career awaits. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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