Arad Goch |
| Arad Goch- Letus , Theatr Gwynedd, Bangor/touring , October 17, 2003 |
| Every year, the play commissioned for the National Eisteddfod faces a tough challenge. In order to maintain a distinct identity, it has to reflect an aspect of local culture or history, but to be true to the national spirit of the Eisteddfod it has to steer clear of anything that could be considered too parochial. This year's offering, Letus - currently touring Wales - grapples successfully with this problem, but in doing so, manages to lose sight of some of the more basic elements of producing good theatre. Central to the play is a nostalgic lost notion of homelessness. The main character, Liz Letus, is the personification of an ideal that no longer exists, that of the romantic itinerant. At the beginning of the play, Liz is seeking admittance to a charitable institution of some sort and is being examined by the doctor before being given a bed for the night. The ambitious doctor is writing a paper on her mental state and uses the examination as an opportunity to probe into her past. As she tells her tale, we are given insight into why she has chosen to live outside the confines of society. Interspersed with the scenes in the doctor's office are a number of scenes where Liz meets and falls in love with another vagrant, a homeless violinist who has escaped persecution in his home country. On paper, the play probably seemed well-structured but transferred onto the stage it is often confusing. Liz suffers from an unspecified mental illness and she recounts her tale by way of a series of scattershot monologues. Important details are mixed in with comic asides and irrelevancies and at times the central performance given by Sara Harris-Davies makes this difficult to follow. There is too much to absorb in so short a time and her performance is so relentless that it becomes easier to tune out rather than strain to try and keep up. It is not a bad performance but it could do with being a little more restrained. The play is surprisingly short and would benefit greatly from having the brakes applied and letting it settle into its natural length, rather than compressing everything into little over an hour. A few cuts to the script and more breathing space for Sara Harris-Davies would probably be enough to make watching Liz a far more pleasurable experience, but there is very little that could be done to ease the pain of watching Iwan Tudor try and make sense of the truly terrible dialogue that he has been lumbered with. The author, Mari Rhian Owen, has tried to convey the way in which a (presumably) eastern European refugee, homeless in rural mid-Wales, would have learnt to communicate in some form of elementary broken Welsh. It is a very difficult task and one in which she has failed. The garbled nonsense that he comes out with is badly conceived and bears little relation to the way in which real people learn to handle a strange language. On the whole, watching Letus is a frustrating experience. It is by no means a bad play but it has elements that are bad and they tend to obscure the parts that are very good. Some of the lines that Liz speaks are excellent but are lost in the babble and the development of the relationship between Liz and Iwan Tudor's character, so central to the narrative, is impossible to take seriously because of Iwan Tudor's character's nonsensical lines. With a little tinkering, Letus could be a very successful play, but as it stands it is a disappointing experience. |
Reviewed by: Dyfrig Jones, Western mail |
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