| Poetic, ambiguous, funny and brutal |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Indian Country , Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff , May 5, 2003 |
| Meic Povey’s Indian Country is that rare animal: a play predominantly set in the past, which avoids sentimental nostalgia and trusts instead in its intricate, multi-layered script to create its impact. The opening scenes quickly establish Povey’s route back into the future: memory captured in the figure of a middle aged man circling his past, like a wolf round a flock of sheep; the past, a triangle of disappointed people caught up in the hoop-la that results from the Hollywood circus crash-landing in1950’s rural Gwynedd. Povey mines the humour in the situation, but his real concern is the fragility of his character’s dream worlds. A subtle symbolism revolving around borrowed coats and real and imitation guns unravels a web of secrets and lies; mispronunciation of a language - a failure to “speak the spoke” - suggests greater misunderstandings that edge towards tragedy. Roles reverse: a shepherd’s son acts out a cowboy and indians fantasy on his home farm; a traumatised American war veteran tries to convince himself he is a Hollywood player and a mother dresses in her dead husband’s clothes, determined on fighting off economic ruin and her buttoned up grief in equal measure. When their worlds collide on a hill top, truth becomes the first victim, trust a close second. The corruption and humiliation underpinning the dream machine of movie land is echoed in a sexual transaction struck between the mother and the American, both hungry for a human contact that seems to have escaped them, the one trapped in the idealised memories of the shepherd-husband, the other in an alcoholism that blots out the horrors of real combat. Povey’s script is simultaneously poetic, ambiguous, funny and brutal; the rites of passage theme wrapped in a beautiful landscape that is, significantly, portrayed as a grave - literally (for the shepherd-father who is drowned in a lake) and metaphorically - here, lie buried the dreams of the central trio, watched over by the boy-cowboy now turned man. The four strong cast (Stuart Laing, Sion Pritchard, Rhys Richards and Eiry Thomas) are uniformly excellent, building up each failed gesture, each missed word into a powerful and at times deeply moving experience. This is the first play Meic Povey has written in English, an opportunity provided by Sgript Cymru, and one that seem so to have brought an added dimension to the script’s development. The backdrop of a Welsh speaking community, which filters seamlessly into a narrative that also adopts “American English” and “English spoken as a second language,” conveys larger questions of identity and belonging, without ever destroying interest in the stories being explored by the quartet of characters. As someone who doesn’t “speak the spoke,” I can only hope more will follow. |
Reviewed by: Penny Simpson |
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