At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Tiny Dynamite , Chapter Arts Centre Cardiiff , December 18, 2004 |
| This review first appeared in the Western Mail... You may not have heard of Abi Morgan, despite the fact she is Welsh and a successful playwright, a rare combination. That’s probably because Ms Morgan not only does not live in Wales but does not write about Wales – not for her the agonies of the Welsh Condition, the identity crisis of Welshness, the issues of a bilingual nation. But, as is evident in Tiny Dynamite, a remarkable play originally performed a couple of years ago in Edinburgh by another Welsh performance expat, Frantic Assembly (also now based in London), Ms Morgan is a fine Welsh playwright who apparently is unaware of the symbolic cultural albatross she is supposed to carry on her shoulders. Sgript Cymru’s Simon Harris chose this powerful play to end his company’s short “Welsh Gold” festival at Chapter to give a taste of Welsh drama over the last forty years, as part of a week’s intensive playwrights course for young writers in both languages at the Wales Millennium Centre. The publicity that claimed these were some of Wales’s most significant theatre plays may be slightly hyperbolic but it did allow works by Gwenlyn Parry and Peter Gill to sit alongside neglected writers like Alan Osborne and, here, Abi Morgan. The plays all got rehearsed readings, a bastard kind of production that too often doesn’t do what it’s supposed to: show us (and, in this case, promising would-be playwrights) what the play is like rather than offer a total theatrical experience. Actors have the script in their hands and perform, with just a day’s rehearsal, on a minimalist set with little action so that the words are at the heart of the show. Maybe Tiny Dynamite isn’t the most appropriate play to get this treatment because, although it is mostly words and no action, it does call for some crucial staging to get across its exploration of the bizarre and the miraculous. It’s about a couple of friends since childhood, one now a very uptight respectable risk-assessment consultant, the other a mentally unstable misfit, who both loved the same woman; the successful guy regularly picks up his disturbed mate and takes him off for a clean-up and a holiday and it’s on one such break they meet a young woman who sparks memories of their shared girlfriend. The consultant, hung up on cause-and-effect and risk-evaluation, is obsessed with bizarre anecdotes of unlikely tragic disasters – like the apocryphal story of the sandwich carelessly thrown from a skyscraper that gained weight and velocity enough to kill the woman it fell on in the street below. By contrast his unpredictable friend leads a charmed life, surviving lightning strikes and bee strings, and the relationship inevitably reminds us, for example, of the two itinerants in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men or Becket’s tramps, with the girl (called Madeline) making up a kind of holy trinity. It’s a rich text, with that mythic religious allegory very much simmering away beneath the telling of anecdotes that can not only be bizarre but can also heal – the fate of the absent girlfriend is resolved by such a mutually-agreed fiction. But how in a rehearsed reading any director (here the excellent Adele Thomas, responsible for Ruth is Stranger Than Richard earlier this year) can create the mixture of mundane and magical, of reality and imagination, I don’t know: Ms Thomas’s strategy of reading out in deadpan tones the stage directions really doesn’t work. Perhaps, too, the attempts by Matthew Bulgo and Glyn Morgan as the two friends to compensate for the lack of action by over-dramatising the words didn’t help (the former particularly guilty of investing his stories with too many mannerisms, the latter at a disadvantage through coming in as a late replacement). Laura Rogers as Madeline seemed to me to get the balance between delivering the text and performing just right, doing neither too much nor too little, with subtly nuanced acting, and mostly letting the words do the talking. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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