At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Ghost City , Arcola, East London , June 24, 2004 |
| IN THE three months since its Cardiff premiere, Gary Owen’s bittersweet hymn to his city has toured the country, played a fortnight in New York and has now opened at the Arcola in east London. The acting area in this converted factory floor is markedly different from the purpose-built confines of Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre, but lighting (Charles Balfour) ably converts the space into a deep rectangle within which Soutra Gilmour ’s setting of grey hollow squares can again be arranged in five neat rows. These wooden squares serve as seats in homes, bars and taxis, the cupboard door in a nursery school, walls for a runaway boy to slump against, and the metaphorical stepping stones his mother must cross to be reunited with him. This closing scene is the first of the 25 in the play — one for each hour of the day (plus a spare) — where real physical and emotional contact is achieved, and it completes the movement begun in the early morning when an all-night radio DJ, abandoned by his listeners, is left in an existential void. In most of the intervening scenes the characters are speaking to themselves or to someone who isn’t seen or doesn’t answer. But gradually the monologue form is tapped into by other voices, at first only hesitantly, with the odd mutter, but gradually introducing words, entire sentences and at last something close to a conversation. In the first of these, a passer-by quite misunderstands why a young couple are arguing, and in the next an old chap with Alzheimer’s keeps forgetting his visitor is his own son. True communication must wait till the end. Each of the cast of four gets to play about six characters, including smug politician (Celyn Jones), gentle teacher (Nia Gwynne), jolly housewife (Rachel Isaac), furious journalist (Jonathan Floyd) and a range of other chancers and wannabes. At some point in each one’s story the speaker feels a sudden, unexplained pain. Sometimes the attack is endured with a brief grimace but in others the speaker doubles up. The tone of the monologue shifts afterwards, sometimes towards greater sincerity but not always, and even on a second viewing no clear pattern emerges. I had remembered the young Zen teacher as the one most successfully coping with the pain but I was wrong: relief may come only when isolation ends. Simon Harris’s acute direction for Sgript Cymru is sensitive to the range of tone within the scenes, as are the excellent actors who inhabit their wildly different roles, projecting charm, arrogance, absurdity or confusion, with winning skill |
Reviewed by: Jeremy Kingston |
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