| Multilingual and Mesmerising |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Indian Country , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , June 4, 2003 |
| From other reviews and the practically epidemic word-of-mouth buzz that preceded the arrival in Aberystwyth of Sgript Cymru's Indian Country, you may already know that in this play, Ingrid Bergman is somewhere offstage. She's in Snowdonia to film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, in which she plays a Christian missionary who saves Chinese souls and bodies from Japanese invaders. While the Swedish actress participates in this blatant lionisation of American imperialism, thirteen-year-old Mos Parry and his young, widowed mother Gwyneth (beautifully played by Eiry Thomas) interact with an American mountebank, Gregg (Stuart Laing). Playwright Meic Povey sets up a predictable scenario -- crass, self-centred American drifter seduces and abandons naive rural girl, disillusioning her and her son, and then moves on into the grey and blinding white sunset. Then Povey explodes the stock expectations he has introduced. Gwyneth is far from naive, and the anti-heroic Gregg can't move on or play the Lone Ranger as easily as he pretends. Mos and Gwyneth find themselves trying on and rejecting different loyalties and professional and social roles as facilely as they alternate between speaking Welsh and English. Personally, I was drawn in by Gwyneth, but not by either of the men in her life. I found Gregg too reprehensible to care for, but not reprehensible enough to shock me into engagement. Mos seemed a bridging device more than a person. The child and adult halves of his character, played respectively by Sion Pritchard and Rhys Richards, recall Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, but unlike the little boy in that play, do not seem to add up to a whole person. However, my appreciation of the character may have been hampered by the fact that I did not find Pritchard a convincing pre-adolescent. Is Indian Country Gwyneth's story? I felt that the focus of the play may need to be more decisiviely or clearly determined. Nevertheless, Povey's words are dramatic poetry -- especially the adult Mos's entrancing backward-looking monologues. He conjures up strong, clear images in these soliloquies. When Mos recalls his father teaching him how to birth lambs, I could see, hear, and feel this remembered experience, down to the heat and the wet and the tension, and Mos's relationship with his father's memory became real and vital. Indian Country has been publicised as Povey's first play in English, but that's not entirely accurate. Mother and son speak in both tongues. The silently communicative stage business devised by the company under Harris' direction also keeps the characters from being confined to either verbal language. They employ mime in particularly evocative yet naturalistic ways. In one of the most powerful moments of this staging, Gwyneth mimetically makes love to a long, tan overcoat, a relic of Mos's father, then buries it. Along with her, and with her son watching from a distance, the spectator may translate the coat into the person it once enclosed and now defines and in some sense preserves. However, that man's memory does not monopolise the coat's signifying power -- in the garment's earlier first appearance, Gwyneth herself wears it, while brandishing its original wearer's rifle. This pose causes Gregg to question her gender. In this production, costumes and props, like languages and 'locations,' are used to create roles and define people, but are also appropriated by multiple characters and used to convey diverse, unexpected meanings. I wanted to see Indian Country again to revisit Povey and Sgript Cymru's dreamscape, to find more of their verbal and nonverbal imagery's complementary and contrasting significations. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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