At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Indian Country , Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff , May 9, 2003 |
| Indian Country is not perfect but it is an assured, fascinating, intelligent, rich, multi-layered piece of writing, full of ironies and with an added topicality in terms of global politics. It's set in the Snowdonia of 1958, when an Anglo-American film crew arrived to transform North Wales into China for the shooting of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and the story is told in flashback by Mos, an elderly man who was then a young boy. An American, Gregg, arrives, complete with porno mag and a penchant for whiskey and fisticuffs, and insinuates himself into the lives of Gwyneth, a young widow, and Mos, her son. But Indian Country, written by Meic Povey (right) is more than an allegory of imperialist domination, whether in Iraq today or as experienced here for centuries, but an exploration of how individual lives, tradition, language, iconography and expectations are inextricably inter-woven. Gregg is a sort-of-likeable seductive liar: he invents a Native American identity to ingratiate himself with Mos, pretends to be an important and influential figure in the film crew in order to bed Gwyneth, is racist and war-scarred - and Mos accepts the fantasy as a bit of authenticity in his cowboys-and-indians game and in the hope of meeting Ingrid Bergman and Gwyneth gives in to temptation for the promise of well-paid work for the film production team. The cultural cost of compromise haunts many national histories: Gwyneth and Mos each pay the price. Both as a complex meditation on national, linguistic and personal integrity and as a human story of deception, false hopes and self-abasement, Indian Country is engaging, for the most part finely crafted in a style that mixes the vernacular with the lyric and the realistic with the metaphorical. In fact one criticism of the script is that is does get weighed down with irony, symbolism and significance - or at least the audience can get distracted by metaphor-spotting so the human story gets lost - with the danger that what actually happens can get confusing. Another is that it isn't very theatrical: it would make a good radio play. The staging of this important piece of drama is disappointing, with an extra-wide set from John Howes that's meant to look like a monochrome cinemascope panorama which could be Wild Wales or the Wild West (or, of course, China) - the landscape so constructed and the shallow depth of performing space may again be deeply symbolic but it does make for problems on Eiry Thomas gives a typically edgy-but-charming performance as Gwyneth and Welsh College of Music and Drama student Sion Pritchard gives a bravura performance as the young Mos, but tighter direction is called for: it can plod at times. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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