At the Sherman |
| Sherman Theatre Company- The Shadow of a Boy , Sherman Theatre Cardiff , February 18, 2005 |
| Gary Owen is probably Wales’s most successful new playwright – but I wonder how many know that ? He burst onto the scene with Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco a few years ago and immediately got signed up by the National Theatre, for whom he has written two plays, and he has already had a volume of his collected work published. This was the first of the National plays, what he calls his first real play, since Crazy Gary was actually a trio of interrelated monologues: The Shadow of a Boy has four characters and dialogue, although you’d hardly call it a conventional piece. For a start, there’s a spaceman at the centre of it, an alien come to check whether Planet Earth is fit enough to join the intergalactic commonwealth: we aren’t of course, what with Thatcher, the Falklands, the ever-present threat of nuclear war, pollution, and so on – and the play is set before reality tv, international terrorism and global warming, just before Bhopal and Chernobyl. Shadow is, of course, a figment of the imagination of a young boy, Luke, inspired by an impressive collection of comics – but, as we discover, the plain-speaking spaceman also has his own identity. Luke (Skywalker ?) is a ten year-old caught between the traditional Christianity of his grandmother, with whom he lives, and the simplistic secondhand radical liberalism of Katie, his precocious friend; at home his Nanna attributes everything to God’s benign power, at play Katie warns him of death by nuclear explosion. Shadow sees that everyone lies: the truth is not as certain as Katie’s mum suggests and not as supernatural as Nanna’s unquestioning belief. Distant sirens may be test warnings from the military base, they may be innocuous klaxons for the Whitland factory workers; pretty flowers can be poisonous; bottles in a stream might be really fishes’ homes. It’s a fascinating, complex play, and it’s extremely well done by four fine actors in Catrin Rhys, Helen Griffin, Oliver Wood and Russell Gomer directed by Alison Hindle, with an excellent set from Jane Linx Roberts – in fact it has one of the most oustanding Sherman companies ever. But who is it for ? All of us, is the easy answer. But we like genres today and this isn’t simply a young people’s play, partly because it is about the responsibility of adults to find a way to tell the truth to young people when the truth isn’t that easy, but it isn’t an exclusively adult play (the Sherman has given it a 13+ rating). It is seen through a child’s innocent eyes but with the perplexed intelligence of an adult. Like all Gary Owen plays, this isn’t easily classifiable – which is one of the reasons he is so interesting as a playwright – and I do hope the fact it can’t be neatly packaged for audiences will not deter people. It really is an outstanding piece of theatre. # As a curtain-raiser there was a real treat: Llanybydder Mart, a Gary Owen monologue performed by the excellent Nikki Rainsford, a striking actress and one of the most underrated in Wales. Russell Gomer and Nikki Rainsford in one programme ? A night of intelligent acting not to be missed. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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