At Fluellen Theatre |
| Fluellen Theatre Company- Wild Wales , Grand Theatre Arts Wing, Swansea , June 23, 2004 |
| George Borrow`s record of his walking tour of Wales in 1854 is a formidable read. Running to over 500 pages of densely-printed and somewhat repetitive text it has, I must confess, beaten me on two attempts to read it. For any others like me (and I`m sure there are many) I can unreservedly recommend that they see Francis Hardy`s brilliant adaptation presented with considerable brio by Fluellen Theatre Company. The show is a total delight, as George Borrow (superbly played by John Norton) takes the audience on a whistle-stop journey from his home in East Anglia to Wrexham and from there to South Wales taking in a host of incidents and colourful characters along the way. All these characters are played, remarkably, by just four actors, George Andrews, Penny Dixon, Claire Novelli and Bethan Thomas and it to their great credit and tremendous performance skills that each character emerges as totally different from the other. Among the characters that stay in the mind are George Andrews` illiterate farmer who stares at a newspaper in the hope that one day the words will come to mean something, Penny Dixon`s Postmistress who tells an absorbing story about a family of robbers at Devil`s Bridge, Claire Novelli`s woman from Shropshire who has been living with her family in Wales for just a few months but just can`t get on with the natives despite trying to learn their language. "The Welsh don`t like strangers, especially those who speak their language" she forlornly says at one stage, and Bethan Thomas`s mesmerising landlady of a remote North Wales pub who tells a genuinely scary ghost story whilst cleverly retaining the humour of the piece. The latter two actors also play Borrow`s wife and daughter and contribute greatly to the laughter quotient by playing them as two people who suffer Borrow`s eccentricities and love of Wales, whilst at the same time longing to return to their native England - which, in fact, they do in a superb scene half-way through the show! Add to this some excellent original and atmospheric live harp music composed and played by Delyth Jenkins and you have a warm, humorous and first class night at the theatre. |
Reviewed by: Charles Walker |
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