Most frequently that ever eager, ever optimistic, bright-eyed son of Anglesey Hugh Hughes is to be spied on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. But suddenly, courtesy of National Theatre Wales, he is to be found on home ground. I missed him on home ground proper, Llangefni, but caught up with him a few miles away, at the Ucheldre Centre in Holyhead.
There he was to be seen admiring the incredibly tall red velvet curtains and introducing us to an absurd reindeer head he had found backstage. He also, in his inimitably charming innocence, managed to be quite rude to the two sets of people who arrived late.
The meat of the evening was provided by the wild tale of Igor, imagined as a film but with no film in sight, that had been prompted by his Nain when he was but eight and a bit. As you would expect from an eight year old it had a tendency to wobble off in all directions but Nain was there to bring it back on track. There were fairly large chunks of morality and philosophy that I suspect were more the province of Hughes' alter ego Shon Dale-Jones. I confess I didn't find it as gripping a narrative as his Story of a Rabbit nor his magnificent Floating, but then that did describe the time when Anglesey broke free and floated away across the ocean.
However, be that as it may, there was a lot to enjoy, not least those moments when Hughes broke out of the narrative to bring to our attention something incidental that had happened. He is a master of the incidental and the seemingly irrelevant. It was a real pleasure to experience him on home ground, bringing his particular brand of apparently random story-telling to a largely unprepared audience.
Nain would be proud to see little Hugh standing in front of all those people showing how proud he is of her.
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