| Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited: “Art at its Best is Impressionistic, Imagistic, Transitory” |
At National Theatre Wales |
| Marc Rees & National Theatre Wales , Laugharne , May 8, 2014 |
Wales Arts Review was there:"The town and its people are the real stars of the show’ is the line a reviewer could write before stepping off the bus in Laugharne. Site-specific theatre of the Marc Rees and Jon Tregenna kind has been the lifeblood of National Theatre Wales; promenade performances, community collaborations and ‘immersive experiences’ have been touchstones of the John McGrath era at NTW. But rarely has the experience been as loose as it is in Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited, a township-wide ‘happening’ that spreads theatre, installation and real life adventure over the best part of three absorbing hours. “Early critical complaints have centred on a perceived lack of characters and performances. I think a point, or perhaps several, have been missed. Firstly, Raw Material had a sister production: the BBC’s glossy who’s-who-of-Welsh-celebrity twenty-first century televisual makeover for the original ‘play for voices’. “For contrast, Raw Material had to be really raw. Secondly, there is balance to strike in these kinds of productions. Between art and theatre, high concept and wide appeal, and – crucially – how much to corral the audience and how much to let them explore. On all counts, I think the balance was far closer to lovely than ugly. “Once the scene has been set – with atmospheric archive footage of Dylan’s Laugharne, a voiceover that claims the poet as ‘a writer for the night’, ‘the private conscience of his time’ and an introductory talk by a randy bus driver – we are left to roam, down Mog Edwards’ Upstreet and up Myfanwy Price’s Downstreet. If we want to we can head up to the Boathouse, or if we feel like it we can visit the Grave. “Death courses through Raw Material in the same way it pulses through Under Milk Wood. As well as Dylan’s final resting place, you could visit The Pelican, a smart Georgian house opposite the Browns Hotel, where a coffin has been passed through the window in re-enactment of the poet’s final journey. Later, we find ourselves as mourners on this same route; locals line Laugharne’s single major street to watch the bizarre spectacle of a black fish-and-chips selling shed being wheeled away to the melancholy sound of the Laugharne Players’ intense humming. “The Shed, of course, is the ultimate piece of symbolism. For all that Voyce’s Creations’ pop-up installations litter the town – eighteen are marked on the official map, along with the phrase ‘and many more!’ – the most iconic is Laugharne’s permanent exhibit: Wales’, and possibly the literary world’s, most famous shed. "Its overwhelming emptiness, in spite of or perhaps because of its carefully-scattered ephemera, is an argument in itself for installation over performance. We are the performers, gawping through glass at the detritus, hoping to glimpse the residue of genius. “We witness Nogood Boyo’s bright yellow boy-racer car, a swinging buoy and an upturned black canoe; listen to tall tales from Captain Cat, a radio broadcast emanating from the Town Hall and Bob Dylan offering ‘Shelter From the Storm’. But when all that is gone the shed will remain. "Minus the addition of a ticker-tape screen running a list of Dylan Thomas’ illustrious influencees across the desk where he practised his craft and sullen art. The whole show was a reminder that art at its best is impressionistic, imagistic, transitory; it hovers on the edges of imagination, just out of explanation’s reach. “Raw Material was by no means perfect; far too many of the pieces had a half-baked feel. But as a collection of fragments that congealed to form a coherent and – at the end – moving, whole, it was almost a match for the original. In its willingness to experiment, to ignore both the false wisdom of convention and the fabricated heaviness of expectation, and to challenge the po-faced dictators of popular taste, it was an unqualified success. “Rees and Tregenna were right to leave the ‘characters’ and ‘performances’ to the BBC: those – yes, wonderful but – ever-so-slightly tired inhabitants of Milk Wood were well overdue a revisit that didn’t involve a competition in professional Welshness. The town and its people etcetera.” * * * * The Telegraph was there. “It was among Laugharne’s inhabitants that Thomas found Under Milk Wood’s eccentric cast of dreamers, lovers and losers, and the amateur Laugharne Players have perpetuated those voices by staging the play every year since 1958. For the poet’s centenary, they have joined forces with site-specific specialists National Theatre Wales to bring the world of the play to life. “Written by Jon Tregenna and imaginatively installed by artist Marc Rees, Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited fuses elements of NTW’s celebrated Passion of Port Talbot, in which all the town was a stage, with the ethos of Punchdrunk, inviting the audience to roam in search of a centrifugal narrative. "Raw Material is topped and tailed by performances for the whole audience, who muster at the start to meet Voyce (Russell Gomer), a hairy wild-eyed magus with a jangling thicket of keys dangling from his neck, and tipsy love-lorn guide Roy Ebsworth-Williams (Charles Dale). "In homage to Thomas’s original play for voices, there are various sound installations dotted around the town, as well as evocative slivers of BBC Wales’s starry new Under Milk Wood showing in a pavilion by the estuary shore under the castle. “There are many lovely touches and in-jokes: a coffin in which a model ship sails on a sea of scrunched-up scraps of Under Milk Wood, a lacy tablecloth consisting of sprinkled salt, Llareggub’s cast list as knitted dolls including a splotch-nosed, flame-curled Thomas, and – a very Dylanesque touch, this – curvy loaves of bread apparently modelled on the breasts of a barmaid in Browns, the poet’s old watering hole. “A landscape-cum-installation in which the audience feels pleasantly absorbed into the canvas, Raw Material teases to breaking point the parameters of theatrical artifice. “What feels slightly absent is cacophony and ribaldry. Other than blind Captain Cat spinning Laugharne yarns in a basement (town mayor John Bradshaw, delightful), there is little humanity to latch on to until the moving finale, which deftly re-enacts the cortege following Thomas’s coffin, whereafter the Laugharne Players close the show by summoning the characters of Llareggub.” Abridged from the full reviews which can be read at: https://www.walesartsreview.org/raw-material-llareggub-revisited/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10807531/Raw-Material-Llareggub-Revisited-Laugharne-Wales-review-imaginative.html |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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