| A Look-back and Guide |
Theatre Event |
| Conferences, gatherings, celebrations, exhibitions , Wales All Points , June 15, 2024 |
1The reports of events below are: 13 June 2024: Andy Roberts and Alston Hughes on Operation Julie “Visionary writer and director, Geinor Styles for having the genius, albeit at first unbelievable, idea to stage the Operation Julie events as a rock musical. And even more thanks to Geinor for her diligent and perceptive research which led to the amazing script. Not a word or scene was out of place and everything interlocked perfectly. The dialogue was concise and sharp, character appropriate and full of gems. Too many to mention but I’ll give you two - Bott’s retort to Meg and her ‘vegetarian’ Welsh cake - “We’re not all vegetarian and we’re not all hippies”. * * * * 10 December 2018: Simon Harris' public tribute to Godfrey Evans “It’s the best Under Milk Wood I’ve ever seen. Instead of folksy sentimentality and overblown romanticism, it was harsh, bizarre, funny, disturbing. The aesthetic was spare and focussed. The staging was sublime. It took the idea of Llaregub as an asylum seriously and wore the influences of Brecht and Artaud – not that I would have heard of them at that time – but it was still something very much true to itself. It was nothing short of visionary and it was performed by teenagers, many ordinary working-class kids – some of whom you will have heard of, know, or may even be friends with now – Rhian Morgan, Caroline Berry, Phyl Harries, Martyn Ellis, Rhys Parry Jones, Russell T Davies.” * * * * 08 April 2018: Gary Owen at the Olivier awards “Owen’s greatest gift is to give a voice to the dispossessed, and he does so here in a blistering, deeply satisfying new work, Killology, produced by the Royal Court in association with Sherman Cymru. Davey (Sion Daniel Young) is a teenage boy simultaneously neglected and indulged by an often errant father, who relates his wretched life at the hands of a gang of local thugs who are inspired to mete out a severe punishment inspired by a computer game they’ve played.” * * * * 11 November 2014: Kate Wasserberg, Wales Arts Review 2nd Roundtable “Kate Wasserberg is present to speak of the imminent Other Room. Theatr Clwyd's loss is Cardiff's gain and one potentially of great significance. The compact location is analogous to those venues in London- Hen and Chickens, 503, Red Lion and White Bear, Latchmere- which act as valuable try-out, testing and introducing feeders for Soho, Bush or Royal Court. I myself wonder whether new writing is not a metropolitan activity. No-one is counting new plays but I would hazard that ninety-something percent in Britain takes place in a few square miles of London. Start at the Tricycle, take a circle around Shepherd's Bush, through Battersea Hill, eastward, then northward to the Hampstead. If the rest of Britain came up with five percent of that total I would be surprised. Certainly, there could be no better preparation anywhere for the Other Room than a period of apprenticeship with the Finborough’s masterly Neil McPherson.” * * * * 10 November 2014: Siân Phillips, Michael McCarthy, Linda Christmas at Critics Round Table “Opera: is opera dying and are the critics killing it?” is an amiable affair joining three critics and an opera-maker. The answer is no, but the dilemma of the critical approach is opened up. Traditional critics of the genre, who have been deeply steeped in musicology, home in on the music. The quality of the conducting, the tone and register of the singing are up for deep scrutiny. Look to the review from “the Sunday Times” this season on “the Trial” as an example. The critical language is one of chord sequences, pulsations and arpeggios.” * * * * 7 April 2014: Shakespeare photography exhibition at Wales Millennium Centre “A sample of the pictures selected shows today’s leads in their youthful roles. Derek Jacobi is a Touchstone from 1967 in a production that is pure nineteen-sixties in style. Timothy West plays Holofernes in 1972 with a mischievous twinkle to his eye. Albert Finney is a Hamlet in action wielding a sword. Helen Mirren is a sad-eyed 1976 Queen Margaret with Alan Howard as a Henry VI buckling under the burden of majesty. Ian McKellen is a near-naked blood-soaked Coriolanus from the National Theatre in 1984. * * * * 06 April 2014: Festival of new plays and playwrights at RWCMD “Dennis Kelly, like Richard Bean, has a big popular hit to help the career along. He too did the life before the writing. “I did a big bunch of shit jobs” culminating in a hated supermarket job before finding fulfillment and expression via a youth theatre company. He brings a robust humour with him. The audience is reminded that a script can mow down any number of humans but kill a cat and there will be outrage. The Kelly plays have a stamp to them that is reflected in the views in public. The talk has shifted once to an actor who took up some television work to prepare for the work he wanted to do; “the Bill” then lasted twenty-five years. Kelly puts it bluntly: “If you compromise now you compromise for the rest of your life.” * * * * 05 April 2014 Festival of new plays and playwrights at RWCMD “Richard Bean is an exemplar of the playwright who had the life before the writing. “I had a gap year” he tells his audience “but it wasn’t Thailand. It was in a bakery.” Lest it sound bucolic he adds that it was the night shift in a Humberside industrial bakery with batches of five thousand loaves at a time. The tales that he tells from this pivotal time in his experience are so ripe and rich that they deserve to be heard in person. The mildest tells of a co-worker who fails to turn up one day. Hull’s next-day newspaper reveals the reason; he is under arrest for attempted bank robbery.” * * * * 27 February 2014: Dylan Thomas Year Peter Blake Illustrating "Under Milk Wood" "Under Milk Wood" in this commemorative year is recipient of a range of treatments. An opera and a ‘live performance adventure’ are in preparation. Terry Hands has returned with intensity to the words themselves. Peter Blake’s homage, as mounted by the National Museum, also has the words in hand-writing and, every afternoon, the rich tones of the radio production in accompaniment to the one hundred and seventy exquisite postcard-sized images.” * * * * 09 September: 2013 World Design Festival at RWCMD “The World Design Festival arrives in Wales after Canada and Korea. With a hundred plus designers in exhibition and two hundred plus live events, embracing the span of masterclass, workshop, lecture and performance, it is, and feels, an occasion of significance. Cardiff’s bid to host the Festival was in competition with Beijing; its significance is indicated by the presence of Edwina Hart at the opening ceremony.” * * * * 26 June 2013: Jony Easterby, Jane Lloyd Francis, Siriol Joyner, Simon Whitehead “The rivers of Wales are well documented. The great enclosures of industrial water are every so often passed around investment banks and hedge funds by the noble commission-men of London. Jane Lloyd Francis is in pursuit of those sources of water that are older, smaller, more elusive, often hidden. Her subject is the tiny wells that watered the fledgling communities of Wales, a quest of fascination in search of these sometimes near-lost places. Essential to life, both individual and community, they acquired symbolic and holy meanings.” * * * * 06 May 2013: Mike Parker “A (Very) Rough Guide to Wales” at Comedy Festival “Dyfi Junction features in Mike Parker’s seventy minute, genre-straddling, talk-gig homage to the place he has made his home for the last fifteen years. The title of Parker’s last book was “Map Addict”. He adores them. He has pored over this Western end of the former Montgomeryshire and discovered that the old kingdoms of Deheubarth and Brycheiniog met at…Dyfi Junction. The station, with its bizarre half-kilometre long platform and thirty lights, has already been celebrated on Youtube. Parker adds his own tribute with an irreverent self-created postcard.” * * * * 26 March 2013: Women in theatre conference at Birmingham Rep “Kate Horton, now the National Theatre's Deputy Executive Producer, is candid on apparently daunting challenges, like of getting “Jerusalem” onto Broadway. Her recently ended tenure at the Royal Court has been a much-praised period, whose accomplishments included a string of new generation women playwrights. Rachel De-lahay, author of “the West Bridge” and now under commission for Film 4, Radio 4 and a string of others, recalls her time with the Royal Court's development programme. The most important dramaturgical aspect, she says, was the end date and the expectation that a full-length play would be delivered. She is frank on her first work's quality, particularly consistency, but doing it is what matters. Scenelets and one-acters do not make a writer.” * * * * 25 March 2013: Women in theatre conference at Birmingham Rep “Gurpreet Bhatti is one such beneficiary from as non-traditional theatre background as might be. Childhood was a three-bedroom home with thirteen residents, with a family of such complicatedness that a birth, marriage or funeral would occur somewhere every week. But even with a track record across television, radio, and theatre in Britain and Europe Bhatti is blunt: “This is a messy business. It's not for everyone. We will experience rejection, humiliation, at any time. It costs when you create something.” * * * * 14 July 2012: Kieron Smith, Ed Thomas, Dafydd James at Cyfrwng conference “Ed Thomas and Dafydd James may be a generation apart in age but they share common aspects of artistic experience. For James the school pupil it was the big world, Tennessee Williams, rather than writers of Wales who hit the formative writer. Even after a period of absence in Edinburgh and London he confesses that he was “struggling to know what to write about.” The Sherman provides the key to unlocking the author’s commitment to write in Welsh. It is a small magic sentence that causes the audience to chuckle: “We’ll give you a small bursary.” The Thomas-James session is an easy, eloquent hour on writing and culture, art and its making. The commentary is uninhibited and personal. From Thomas: “There’s a stranglehold of mediocrity here in Wales.” Dafydd James gives an unusual piece of advice to the aspiring writer: “Make a mess first, throw out the mess and you may end up with a structure”. * * * * 14 June 2012: John Harrison “Forgotten Footprints” “Forgotten Footprints” is a new title this season from Cardigan publisher Parthian. It is also title of an eleven-venue performance tour that includes Chapter and Rhosygilwen. Appearances at Hay and Dinefwr might suggest a literary event, but it is not. “Forgotten Footprints” has a script, a director in the heavyweight form of Rebecca Gould. It has video, a sound design and a score by composer Tim Riley. Theatre is an elastic term for the range that comes within its auspices. “Forgotten Footprints” has thematic focus, form and feeling, and to a degree to outdo many a one-person performance piece. John Harrison has even written in a villain by name of John Lachlan Cope.” * * * * 08 November 2011: Lucid at Chapter “Simon Harris does a brisk summary of the rather good paper he submitted for the Arts Council of Wales on the “savants” and “water-carriers” in management. The paper is in the same series- “what we do/ funding/ investment review/debate”- as a paper by Mererid Hopwood. She makes the valid point that a good measure of cultural activity goes wholly recorded by the commissars and pay-masters. Theatre-makers are great at doing it, less good at talking about it. The small companies, who don't have fulltime marketing and communications staff, can be excused. “Theatr Iolo’s “Under the Carpet” made it to Korea. Geinor Styles' play on Alfred Russell Wallace is currently in Colombia via Brazil and due soon for Singapore. It is not just the big companies winning their awards this month. The little companies, propelled by hope, debt and determination, have a lot to sing and dance about.” * * * * 07 November 2011: Lucid on new writing at Chapter “Good humour prevails. “I think I’m an emergent artist” says one “but no-one has ever told me what it is I’m emerging into.” Too true. Once upon a time there was a kind of career path. And once upon a time Britain’s railways were packed on a Sunday with one hundred and fifty theatre companies travelling to new venues. Nonetheless, the comment that residencies get handed out to writers already making a bit of money does seem a peculiar practice. But the writers are realistic. Even if the Sherman were to become a Soho Theatre, it would take a decade to stage a single play from every aspirant writer. Like Hardy’s character Little Father Time indeed “We are too menny.” * * * * 01 July 2011: Richard Burton celebration at RWCMD “There is an alternative answer to be found in Gwynne Edwards’ play that has been selling out Welsh venues for a year or so now. His Burton, and that of biographers, is of the man whose happiest moments were by his fire at Celigny in Switzerland, a new book in his hand. An early job had been as delivery boy with the Co-op. The shortest despatch would take a strangely long time; the Co-op bicycle was often to be seen parked outside the local Carnegie Library. On his travels his book bag was always there. His love of writing, they say, eclipsed his love of acting. Burton’s correspondents covered an enormous range, not just fellow actors but Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, J K Galbraith and A L Rowse, even President Nixon.” * * * * 30 June 2011: Richard Burton celebration at RWCMD “Lastly, Victor Spinetti came on stage not just as a fellow actor and friend but as an early alumnus of the Royal College. That his larger-than-life gusto infected those he worked with is clear. But Richard Burton is different from other actors. The difference is that he left notebooks, three hundred thousand words worth of observation and inner experience. His notebook for 10th January 1969 runs “the more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murdering envious scatological soul the more I realize that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will ever change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade-ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot.” * * * * 28 May 2011: Rowan Williams and Simon Russell Beale in Conversation “The conversation may cover hell and grace, muse whether a stance might be more Stoic than Christian, or ponder the character who prefers death to forgiveness. But it is never ponderous. A play has so many messages that it is “jammed like a call centre”. Leontes and Hermione may well be re-united after sixteen years of separation but “what do they say to each other that night after dinner?” Intelligence need not mean earnestness. Shakespeare’s plays, says the Archbishop, are filled with friars, “machiavellian cardinals, idiot vicars.” These “idiot vicars” are foundation for a seam of irreverence in British literature that runs through to P G Wodehouse.” * * * * 09 April 2011: The Society of British Theatre Designers exhibition “Wales is represented by Mold's regulars. Mark Bailey's design for Tim Baker's 2008 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has Athens transformed to fairyland with the falling of a hundred thousand leaves. Sean Crowley's work for Theatr Genedlaethol's powerful 2008 “Y Pair” is here. “Max Jones is represented by Kate Wasserberg's “Dancing at Lughnasa” of last Autumn and Philip Breen's 2008 “Measure for Measure.” The exhibition has a letter in which Terry Hands writes a nice aphorism for the relationship between design and production. Of Max Jones he says “Max has never given what was asked for. It has always been what was needed.” * * * * 06 October 2007: Symposium: "Who Needs a National Theatre? “However, it took a practitioner, Tim Baker, describing himself as eighty percent Associate Director for Theatr Clwyd Cymru and twenty percent director and writer at large, to shoot from the hip. In rapid fire, Wales had too few young and ambitious directors, no canon of drama writing- this elicited a shout of protest from an audience mmeber. Carmarthen-based Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru had not been fairly treated. The very term “national” raised unrealistic expectations for an embryonic company requiring time to mature. If Theatr Clywd Cymru had a view over the Taff rather than the Clwydian Hills would this debate even be taking place? Why was this new endeavour being cast as a monolingual venture? He played well with the audience.” * * * * 05 October 2007: Symposium: "Who Needs a National Theatre?” “To Scotland, and the view from Rebecca Robinson, Drama Advisor to the Scottish Arts Council, of the National Theatre of Scotland was altogether rosier. Firstly, the company has youth on its side, having been established only three years ago, secondly it enjoys what universal consensus deems to be truly visionary artistic leadership, and thirdly, with Gregory Burke’s “Black Watch”, it has had an acclaimed monster hit, both artistically and commercially.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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