| A Look-back and Guide |
Theatr Y Byd |
| Theatr Y Byd , Theatre of Wales , March 8, 2024 |
Productions of Theatr Y Byd are reviewed below:28 March, 26 March, 25 March, 19 March, 02 March 2006: “Butterfly” “Butterfly is a beautiful play, at times delicate like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, at other times haunting and towards the end, has us on the edge of our seats with excitement. The clarity and flow of Ian Rowlands’ poetry is extremely intoxicating. And has the potential to bubble like champagne. “With each play we are able to celebrate the writer’s consummate artistic creativity but it is his command of the craft of playwriting that captivates here. An older man has just brought a younger man back to his elegant home for a night of passion but do they jump straight into bed? No. As they seductively circle one another they dazzle us with a totally captivating discourse on the nature of modern art and the nature of beauty with shafts of Rowlands’ wry humour shooting in, all the while. “The critic hints that earlier circumstances have drained him of his ability to appreciate the beauty in works of art and that he has despatched all his paintings, bubble-wrapped into store. What does intrigue the boy is the display of wing-outstretched butterflies around the room, part of the atmospheric art installation of Tim Davies. The critic now prefers “dead flying things” to vital modern works of art around him.” * * * * 22 March 2005, 15 March 2005, 11 March 2005: “Flowers from Tunisia” “Christine Pritchard's portrayal of Reah - a woman caught in the grip of rapidly encroaching dementia - is one of the many good things about this finely observed drama by Laurence Allan, whose own mother provides the inspiration for the central character. “Reah's trip to Tunisia with her friend Rose(Sharon Morgan)sees the pair meeting up with a gentle young flower seller called Khalid(William El Gardi)of whom Reah becomes fond - so fond, in fact, that she wants to marry him and take him back home to Wales. Enter Reah's son - fuelled by a suspicion of foreigners in general and Muslims in particular. At one stage he threatens Khalid while listening to Ozzy Osbourne on the headphones which he wears almost constantly. "Hear that?" he says. "That's the sound of the British at War." “Drama which achieves such a skilful balance between laughter and tears is rare indeed, and Theatr Y Byd are to be commended for this impressive and compelling production.” * * * * 26 March 2003, 04 April 2003: “Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage” “This is a play about ideas and crammed with rich lines and meaty, chewy words – pure gifts for actors like Brendan Charleson, who excelled as the flaming, self-tortured Lawrence, Martina Messing as the sensuous, powerful Frieda, and Morgan Rhys as an intense repressed homosexual, shifting from uncomfortably tentative to offended to relaxed. Just a few minutes into the play and the characters are already pitting their values against each other. “This is no radio play but it would be too wordy for the screen. Davies is perceptive about the games people play with themselves as much as with others. And then the final scene is beautifully tongue in cheek, self-reflexive, sharply witty. The humour that levened the intellectual debate was earthy and verbal. There was a ripple of laughter for example when Rhys Davies summarises a gay acquaintance as ‘a recovering vegetarian’ and another when Frieda’s description of the sex in Rhys’s book as ‘repressed and guilty’ was explained away by Lawrence’s simple: ‘he’s Welsh’. “Theatr y Byd should be proud of this play. Opinionated, at times awkward and a little stiff, it is also fiercely intelligent and passionate about its huge subjects: how to live, what is the function of art, what kinds of games do people play with each other. The play’s a pleasure in these days of the plastic roses of entertainment and the gritty issue-led theatre.” * * * * 27 October 2001: “Inside Out” “On this day, in this place I enjoyed the enormous privilege of watching a consummate work of art, a piece of indigenous Welsh Theatre of the highest degree of professionalism and creativity. A work that the English National Theatre and The RSC would have been proud to have produced. “Envisaging a play about Ivor Novello one might expect the sort of campery and romance associated with the great Welshman's life style and musical work. "Inside Out" by Lesley Ross in collaboration with the play's director Chris Morgan goes much deeper than that. Ivor is clearly at the centre of the play and Roland Powell gives a storming performance bringing out so many facets of the complex person that Ivor Novello was beneath the urbanity and sophistication.” * * * * 29 March 2001, 12 March 2001: “Pacific” “For bilingual audiences, this is the second bite at the latest play from one of the most interesting and passionate of Welsh playwrights, Ian Rowlands, and his Theatr y Byd company - the Welsh language version, Mor Tawel, was commissioned for the last Eisteddfod and is touring to other venues concurrently with this English-language version. “The central character, like Rowlands, was himself bilingual - David Samwell, a Denbigh man who became a ship’s surgeon, one of the London Welsh of his time, along with poet Iolo Morganwg, part of an elite Welsh Diaspora who helped shape the idea of Welsh national identity. Samwell’s 1770s journals form the basis of this startling dramatic monologue “Rowlands’s language pours out like a torrent and even Richard Elfin, excellent actor as he is, cannot always help drowning us in ideas and words. It is a fine performance but while the play, directed by the author, grips us it doesn’t really hold us. Breathtakingly lyrical and intelligent, Pacific, it seems to me, refuses to yield up a heart.” * * * * 01 November 1999: “New South Wales” “Longhurst's obstreperous cabbie picks up Alex played by ex-teenage Gwent-boy Scott Bailey), a young Welshman who has apparently been backpacking and odd-jobbing in Australia, outside Paddington at 2.00 a.m. Unlike Dannie Abse's more famous returning native, Alex has missed the last train for his return to Cardiff. As the journey progresses, the two characters develop a rapport. Ironically, the taxi driver has always wanted to travel, so Alex regales him with stories tall ones, as it turns out) of his escapades Down Under. For both men Australia represents freedom and adventure, a Promised Land, a Xanadu, having superseded Ed Thomas's America now seen as "too real, too close for comfort") as the land of opportunity. When Alex eventually confesses the deception and admits that he has, in fact, never been to Australia, the fantasy collapses like a house of cards. “A kind of theatrical football, the play is a game of two halves, not in the sense of a literal interval or a break for orange segments, but in the way that each of the two characters appropriates the dominant voice when on his own territory. In the first half the taxicab travels from England to Wales and the driver maintains an almost incessant monologue, punctuated only by the occasional murmur of assent from his passenger. When they reach Cardiff Bay, however, and the two men get out of the cab, the Welshman secures the conversational ball; he is on home turf now, here he has a voice. This is meaningful because the non-events occur in the early hours of the day of the Welsh devolution vote, that vote being a privilege for which Alex has paid a fare of nigh on £200 more than a hint of dramatic irony here when we recall that nearly half of the electorate in Wales didn't vote when the polling station was on their doorsteps).” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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