At the Torch |
| The Torch Theatre- A Prayer for Wings , Torch Theatre, Milford Haven , February 14, 2001 |
| Sean Matthias, perhaps best known as a director and for his relationship with Ian McKellen, wrote A Prayer for Wings in the 1980s, when it was hailed as the work of a major new Welsh playwriting talent. It won plaudits and prizes at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1985. It moved to the Bush and won another award. In what rare writing on modern Welsh theatre there is, it is mentioned; Theatr Clwyd revived it in 1990 and thus gave it some sort of status. The question is: can A Prayer for Wings be seen as a seminal, or even significant contribution to contemporary Welsh drama ? Peter Doran’s production for his Torch Theatre Company is very good and at least exposes the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the play. And it is certainly problematic. The setting is a converted church in a terraced street in Swansea. The characters are a middle-aged woman crippled with multiple sclerosis (Helen Griffin) and her plain teenage daughter Rita (Catrin Rhys). The play covers what is presumably a few weeks and culminates, inevitably, in the mother’s death - but also in the daughter’s discovery of hope in the form of a young lad who for once does not simply want to get into her knickers. It is on the surface a deeply grim piece of social realism. The daily routine is a monotonous one of meals, the laundrette, nursing and signing on. The mother is scarred from a deserting husband in a brief marriage that has left her mistrustful of all men and disapproving of sex; her pleasures come from treats like fish and chips, baked beans and chocolate bars. The daughter, a virgin, feels trapped into caring for her mother, dreams of idyllic love and finds solace with the pimply youths who feel her up on the local rec or pay her a fiver for intercourse in her room that is never achieved. Matthias allows us to sympathise with both characters but, crucially, never allows us to take sides: there is no moral certitude here, as we feel both for a bitter woman denied love and facing death with some fortitude and bravery and for her abject daughter who half-wishes her dependent mother dead but whose frustration and self-deprecation is all too understandable. They both want to escape, the mother trapped by her experiences and her debilitating condition, the daughter by the mother’s dependence and by her own lack of self-esteem. Men are either filthy exploiters or romantic heroes. Desire for the one is tea and toast and treats, for the other storybook love and marriage. The play, and this production, make us not only depressed (despite the ambiguous ending) but uncomfortable. We need clear through-lines, some sort of guidance on whose side we should be on, some sort of answer, a light at the end of the tunnel, and we don’t get any of this in a postmodernish lack of certainty. The sex scenes, where Rita dispassionately masturbates her adolescent clients and so unwittingly ensures that with their premature ejaculation she never does lose her virginity are distressing and not just because of the sexual acts. So what makes it Welsh ? It could, after all, be set anywhere and in many ways is in the spirit of those mid-twentieth century novels and plays usually set in Northern towns, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. What makes it a Welsh play is first that it is by a Welsh writer and set in a Welsh location. Matthias comes from Swansea - although the posh end, Sketty, and probably never knew first-hand the hardships of living on the social in a terrace - and says that it is important for him that the play is produced in Wales. He also set a later play, Swansea Boys (1993), in his home town But more importantly A Prayer for Wings is in some ways a state-of-the-nation play in the tradition of Change, The Keep and Ed Thomas’s early plays. The converted chapel stands for Wales, with its puritan morals now redundant. There is the familiar iconic Mam. Not only Mam as Wales but as a nation confused and schizophrenic - Doran makes her bedtime reading a prayerbook and Ideal Home magazine as she suffers the claustrophobia of religion. The despair and the hope of a better future are embodied in Rita, who dreams of escaping to America. The future can only come with the death of the mother and even then it seems to be unrealistically optimistic. And so on. Let’s not be too reductionist - this is no simple-minded piece of symbolism, but the play’s claims to be anything more than an engaging but depressing melodrama rely on these deeper levels. There are, unfortunately, other levels that create problems, meanings not intended by the author but exposed (though I feel not exposed enough) in the Torch production. Essentially they revolve around what can be seen as a patrician perspective: a Welsh-émigré middle-class man’s take on Welsh working-class women. I detected a patronising, stereotyping, misogynist tone infecting the apparent compassion. And that inevitably questions the play’s integrity and value in terms of social realism, political argument and historical status. I wanted the Torch production, in so many ways intelligent and detailed and affecting, to address these problems, to interrogate this play more rigorously, to question the assumptions and presumptions of the author, to reassess its status. I suspect it may well do so (I saw it on the opening night) as it settles in on its tour of Wales. As it is, the production flatters the play and makes it a better piece of theatre than it deserves. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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