| A Look-back and Guide |
Theatre History |
| Plays, Theatres, Playwrights, Actors, Scholars , Theatre in Wales and World , February 27, 2026 |
Theatre echoes across the ages. Sir Ernst Gombrich “Meditations on a Hobby Horse”: “For that strange precinct we call “art” is like a hall full of mirrors or a whispering gallery. Each form conjures up a thousand memories and after-images. No sooner is an image presented as art, than by this very act, a new frame of reference is created which it cannot escape.” Art is the refutation of time. Much has changed since 429 BCE when Sophocles made second place at a festival for “Oedipus Rex”. A little known nephew of Aeschylus was the winner. But some things are unchanged. It is the art of contested purpose. Charmian Savill in Planet: “Theatre is not our friend: it is a cruel vessel, exposing our fault-lines.” Psychologically, to be made aware of duality makes for wholeness over singularity of perception. Peter Bazalgette’s first speech as Arts Council Chair: “The arts create shared experiences that move us to laughter or to tears.” A trio from Michael Billington: “To create a separate area of theatre that is primarily “visual”, and to endow it with a sanctified purity as many as its apologists do, is simply to create a meaningless ghetto. And it is essentially conservative.” Theatre: “a public service to be interpreted, evaluated, and fought for with whatever critical passion one can muster.” “Critics are haunted, solitary theatre-nuts who cannot be willed into existence by editorial magic.” The articles below: 2 March 2026: Angela V John- Behind the Scenes: the Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton * * * * 26 June 2025: Paintings Inspired by Wales' First National Theatre * * * * 30 May 2024: Martin Morley Cwmni Theatr Gwynedd “Theatr Gwynedd was opened by the then University College of North Wales (later Bangor University). It was a 344-seat performance space presenting Welsh, English and International theatre as well as concerts, opera, dance, pantomime and children's entertainment...in 1986 it became a producing company in its own right, though still owned by Bangor University. Most of these were directed by Graham Laker who I first worked with when I was resident designer with Theatr Cymru and he was a lecturer in the Drama Department at Bangor University.” * * * * 15th February 2024: Martin Morley Cwmni Theatr Cymru “The company was founded by Wilbert Lloyd Roberts in the 1960s as the Welsh speaking arm of the Cardiff based Welsh Theatre Company and shared workshops and technical facilities with them. It did not spring from nowhere but as a response to a great deal of activism in support of the Welsh language at the time and the stand made by Saunders Lewis. "In 1973 it acquired a disused chapel in Bangor to use as its own technical base and it became fully independent. As there were no purpose built theatres then in Welsh speaking areas, all designs had to fit in various school and village halls.” * * * * 11th January 2024: “Chapter: The Origin Story” by Christine Kinsey “Chapter is a tale of the 1960s. “In December 1968 I co-founded Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff with Bryan Jones and Mik Flood.” The three were aware of the counter-culture, by then in full flourish, and the lack of a venue in the city. Over Christmas a decision was made to form an Arts Centre Project Group. “An advertisement was placed in a key publication of the era, the International Times. The journal's colourful history had begun two years before at an all-nighter at the Roundhouse with Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. Within a few months it had invited a police raid but nonetheless continued to publish. Paul McCartney was a source of financial help. The Welsh advertisement attracted a single response. But that respondent was Peter Jones, Assistant Director for Art at the Welsh Arts Council.” * * * * 27th July 2023: Deborah Philips “And This Is My Friend Sandy” “The arc of gay theatre looked settled, a current that ran broadly in line with legal reform. The stepping stones ran “The Killing of Sister George” (1964) “Staircase” (1966), “The Boys in the Band” (1968), the founding of Gay Sweatshop (1975). Simon Callow performed in Martin Sherman's “Passing By” (1974) and a revision of Christopher Hampton's “Total Eclipse” (1981).” * * * * 1st December 2022: Peter Lord and Rhian Davies “Art of Music” “The book records throughout the attention that power pays to culture. A half millennium ago government was suspicious. Some of the minstrels were considered to harbour “sinister usages and customs”. The Act of Union was intended to “extirpate” such customs and prosecutions of minstrels ensued. The same story, not in the book, is told elsewhere. Europe had a tradition of minstrels who travelled lightly with only zithers or guitars. They sang songs about free will and were known as the freedom people. Peter the Great did not like them at all. In 1700 he decreed there should be no more such people. Everyone should be part of an estate with fixed duties.” * * * * 21st October 2022: Production of “White Collar” by P H Burton * * * * 20 November 2020: “100 Years of the Labour Party and the Arts” “Aneurin Bevan's mother lost the ability to read over the course of having ten children. His passion for books meant he could quote Nietzsche and discuss F H Bradley. He knew Kant's Categorical Imperative well enough to impress an Oxford scholar. His engagement with the arts extended to life. The Library he served had a budget of £300 a year in the 1920. “Nearly all the successes at the secondary school are children who use our library.” “His friends in London were diverse: Jacob Epstein, Matthew Smith, Constance Cummings, Will Dyson. As for the moving within culture it had a purpose. “The first weapon in the worker's armoury must be a strongly developed bump of irreverence” * * * * 05 November 2020: “A Dirty Broth” J O Francis, Caradoc Evans “So to the playwrights. “J.O. Francis probably had his Welsh “educated out of him” in the system of his era. “He learnt Welsh as an adult, memorising verb tables while on guard duty in the army, but was never confident enough to write in it.” By contrast Francis said of Richard Hughes, who never learnt the language, that he “would do well to acquire that modicum of Welsh speech without which he will not make the race yield up the heart of its mystery.” * * * * 30 October 2020: Nicholas Ridout “Theatre and Ethics” “An earlier German is cited. Kant set the moral imperative of relation to others; that they be treated as ends in themselves and not as means. From the “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” of 1785 the categorical imperative is interpreted as “the ethics derived from this principle is a way of regulating, or of managing the relationship between the particular (individual) and the universal (humanity at large).” “The author does call this “one of the great emancipatory achievements of the enlightenment.” The book does not cover the translation of the categorical imperative onto the stage by Schiller and others. There is some time spent with the greats of the Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Adam Smith. The focus is on the lesser-known Smith, author of the “Theory of Moral Sentiments" of 1759.” * * * * 18 December 2018: Christopher B Balme “The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies” “Theatre Studies, nobly ambitious in its origin, has diverged into various currents. One contains an inherent loftiness, and daftness. Thus a Theatre Studies lecturer can declare “A piece of performance art and cultural nourishment can not be satisfactorily explained in common words.” This is false. It is description, evocation and evaluation. “It's impossible to accurately convey the texture, aroma and... inspiration behind each piece of reflective work. Such crude and simplistic descriptions are better suited to the right wing populist drivel beloved by the masses.” * * * * 28 February 2018: Alan Phillips “the Cinemas of West Wales” “Cinema and authority have at times been at loggerheads since the earliest days. “Life of Brian” was nothing new. A century ago ecclesiastical authority condemned a film called “From the Manger to the Cross.” On February 9th 1916 the Pavilion in Cardigan showed it nonetheless, earning itself headlines in doing so. The films that Phillips remembers would stretch the expertise of many a self-declared film buff. Haverfordwest’s New Palace Cinema opened with “Zuma, King of the Gypsies.” In 1909 Carmarthen’s Market Cinema was showing “the Beggar’s Gratitude.” In 1915 the town’s Empire Cinema was showing “The Jockey of Death” and “Married to a German Spy.” * * * * 28 November 2017: P H Burton “Granton Street” “The rediscovery of Philip Burton's “Granton Street” has attracted considerable interest. Its culminating performance in Port Talbot was clearly an event of import for the town where its author was maker of one of Wales' acting greats. Lewis Davies was present for the performance and concluded “It is a play with a history and is of significance to the tradition of Welsh stage history.” Not only has Fluellen Theatre performed a service in bringing it to audiences of 2017 but it is also available in print. Once again it is a tiddler of an organisation that has done it, in this case Alun Books also of Port Talbot.” * * * * 25 October 2017: Mary Owen “J O Francis” “The author, coming from her historical perspective, is particularly strong on the social geography of the town at its economic peak. The life of John Oswald Francis spanned 1882-1956. At the time of his teenagehood a walk from Pontmarlais Circus led to the Theatre Royal and Opera House. The County Intermediate and Technical School was new. The school that Francis attended had been thirty years in the planning. “And what a blessing the school was to Merthyr. And what a blessing it was to me!” was how Francis expressed it later in a radio broadcast.” * * * * 15 October 2017; Production of “Granton Street” by P H Burton * * * * 13 November 2015: Angela V John “The Actors' Crucible” “Richard Burton was one of seven members from a Youth Centre Drama Group to act in Glamorgan’s first Youth Eisteddfod. In June 1942 in Pontypridd he played a reformed convict in “the Bishop’s Candlesticks”, an adaptation of “Les Miserables” into a one-acter. Taibach won first prize. Burton’s voice, set to become one of the most celebrated of his age and inseparable from “Under Milk Wood”, had small opportunity to impress on this occasion. The production was all in mime.” * * * * 10 December 2012: John Major “My Old Man” “The flops, the let-downs, the days without work, the lash of critical opinion. It was not until years later, with the political critics poised, invective flowing and the national audience restive, that I fully understood all the emotions that had been so familiar to them.” * * * * 20 August 2011: Sheridan Morley “Theatre's Strangest Acts” “The occasional tale leaves the stage door far behind. Morley captures Ivor Novello in all his colossal fame and celebrity. Novello has an interest in meeting the equally successful writer Edgar Wallace. It fails to happen. On a train out of New York Novello has his pet dog with him. He joins him in the guard's luggage wagon and sits on a box covered with a black blanket. When the guard finds him he is somewhat discomforted, the container being in fact a coffin. Novello asks and the guard replies “It's going to London, sir. And on the same liner as you. He was a theatrical gentleman too. His name was Edgar Wallace.” * * * * 29 December 2010, 27 December 2010: Benedict Nightingale “An Introduction to 50 Modern British Plays” “Lists comprise two categories. The “outs” can be as glaring as the “ins”. So, to the not-included: “Out of these and other agonies a compromise list eventually emerged.” Those from a first selection which were to go included Henry Arthur Jones, Rodney Ackland, Emlyn Williams, Auden and Isherwood, Joan Littlewood, David Mercer, Charles Wood, Heathcote Williams. If the book does anything it is reminder of a theatre culture of abundance. Pinero, Hankin, St John Ervine, Simon Gray, Peter Shaffer all knocked for entry to be among the 50.” * * * * 01 December 2010: Michael Billington “One Night Stands” “Criticism is writing and writing is craft. It is getting the right words. When “Company” arrived there had not been a piece of musical theatre like it. “Its surface exuberance seems to conceal a great sadness” he writes”...it has the whiplash precision of the best shows plus a great deal of intellectual resonance.” At “Comedians” “not only does it annex new territory by putting a class for apprentice comedians on to the stage, but it has the same muscle, dialectical fairness and suppressed pain that characterised Griffiths's “the Party”. * * * * 01 October 2010: Nadine Holdsworth “Theatre and Nation” “The book is very much better when it moves to the specific. The first actual theatre cited is that of South African theatre and the remarkable part that the Market Theatre of Johannesburg played. In Britain the first dramatist mentioned is Roy Williams. His “Days of Significance” was reviewed last year, November 2009, when the RSC toured to Cardiff. Holdsworth goes back to his “Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads” of 2004. Robin Soans' “Mixed Up North” from 2008 is discussed and the book goes back to “the Entertainer”, although Holdsworth has little time for Osborne. His play, despite its many revivals and a film that still holds up well, is a “petulant and rather lazy way of pointing to the nation's decline.” This points to the gap, gulf even, between performance scholarship and drama criticism.” * * * * 29 August 2010: Michael Billington “One Night Stands” “At the end of the decade Billington looks back. “A generation of writers had emerged... written some damned good plays: “Comedians”, “Plenty”, “Destiny”, “Brassneck”, “City Sugar”, “Fanshen”, “Knuckle”, “Claw.” It fitted an onward roll. “From the mid-fifties to the late seventies the British theatre had been endlessly productive and continually expanding.” But in a book conceived in 1991 he adds with benefit of hindsight. “By the end of the decade it began to look as if the party might not last that much longer.” * * * * 01 August 2010: Kenneth Tynan “Theatre Writings” “Shellard includes Tynan's summary-cum-parody of theatre's staple in what he called“the Loamshire Play”. There is always a schadenfreude of hindsight to be had when those old guys in the past got it wrong. “Is America really peopled with brutalised half-wits?” starts a review which goes on to end “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.” The date is May 31st 1953, the author is Harold Hobson and he is watching that fountain of pure joy “Guys and Dolls.” * * * * 10 August 2009: Robert Brustein “Theatre of Revolt” “Brustein lays into a generation of critics who “visualise Ibsen as a bemedalled journeyman-dramatist, equipped with side whiskers, a portly belly, and an impeccable family life, who becomes- after a somewhat unstable youth- one of the most respected and respected members of the Norwegian community.” Mencken in particular is called out for rebuttal.” * * * * 06 April 2009: Robert Brustein “Seasons of Discontent” “The USA's most treasured authors are up for a critical duffing-up. “The Night of the Iguana” has good things to it. But Tennessee Williams “has explored this territory too many times before.-the play seems tired, unadventurous and self-derivative.” Arthur Miller fares worse. “”After the Fall” is “three and one-half-hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness.” In “Incident in Vichy” “Mr Miller has given us not so much a play as another solemn on Human Responsibility. The trouble with Mr Miller's sermons, apart from the fact that they are tedious, glum and badly written, is that they are so uncomplicated.” * * * * 05 April 2009: Robert Brustein “Seasons of Discontent” “Even Richard Burton's return to “Hamlet” irks him. “He is all colour, like an Action painting...he sniffs, brays barks too much; and he is more dour and surly than truly melancholy.” Hume Cronyn as Polonius is better- “a cranky, rheumatic, avuncular but forthcoming and sagacious counsellor.” “Brustein likes “Zoo Story” very much, almost more than any other play he covers. Of “Roots” Brustein observes “Arnold Wesker would seem to be another dramatist who has been praised too quickly; compared with Albee, in fact, he looks like a theatrical primitive. For while “the American Dream” is a high-fidelity playback of the latest avant-garde tunes, “Roots” plays as if the author had just stumbled on John Galsworthy.” “Theatrical primitive” is not the nicest of epithets. But then Brustein is a rare critic in deploying scythe as well as scalpel.” * * * * 17 December 2007: Michael Billington “State of the Nation” “A welter of new dramatists arrive in the last 100 pages: Timberlake Werthenbaker, Charlotte Keatley, Billy Roche, Mustapha Matura, Winsome Pinnock, Mark Ravenhill, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh. The new companies that take centre stage include Cheek by Jowl, Kick Theatre, Theâtre de Complicité, Renaissance Theatre Company. The new directors are Sam Mendes, Katie Michell, Stephen Daldry, Ian Rickson. Billington picks out the particular class and clout of the Almeida under Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid. Among the stream of productions is “a classy revival of Anouilh's “the Rehearsal” that transferred silkily to the West End.” It is an artful choice of adjective as the production, although not mentioned, was dressed by Jasper Conran.” * * * * 16 December 2007: Michael Billington “State of the Nation” “The sheer span of theatre is essentially uncatchable. Billington attempts a taxonomy that he admits does not adequately fit. Thus Ayckbourn, Hampton, Pinter and Stoppard are grouped as “Contemporary Classicists” but only “for want of a better term.” The other two categories are “Disturbers of the Peace” and “Anatomists of Albion”. The disturbers are Barnes and Bond, Orton and Wood. The last grouping includes Bennett, Nicholas, Osborne and Storey.” * * * * 15 December 2007: Michael Billington “State of the Nation” “On Terence Rattigan: “a traditionalist drawn to classical structures and reticent understatement: thematically, he endorsed defiance of convention and society's repressive rules.” Billington alights on the forgotten, gay-coded “Accolade” and writes of Emlyn Williams: “it was Williams' Celtic obsession with doubleness and ambiguity that marked him out as a peculiarly fascinating writer.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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