At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Crossings , Chapter Arts Centre Cardiiff , March 22, 2005 |
| You could come out of Chapter’s Studio theatre exhilarated, enthralled and excited simply because you will have seen that rare beast, a hard-edged intelligent and uncompromising Welsh play. Clare Duffy’s ambitious, lyrical and sexually-challenging piece is also on the whole well acted and well-staged by Sgript Cymru, Wales’s new-writing company, and is certainly worth an evening of anyone’s leisure time. But maybe we shouldn’t let the novelty value override serious criticisms. Leaving aside whether it’s a Welsh play – it may be set in South Wales but Ms Duffy has long adopted Leeds as her spiritual home, having spent only a year or so here doing an MA at Glamorgan and working with Sgript Cymru as a community writer – there are real weaknesses in the script, familiar faults in an immature playwright, too many ideas, not enough character development. This is, though Ms Duffy’s first solo play – I know her work as part of the Unlimited Theatre collective, an exciting company committed to putting marginalised voices centre-stage with a theatre that is both intelligent and emotional. And for a first play, it’s not bad. What’s different is its milieu, the gay scene of Cardiff. Jane, the main character, is in love with Bethan and her best friend was the homeless and flamboyantly gay Sam. He’s died and his ghost visits Jane to tell her to find his murderer, bringing her in contact with the ageing Eng Lit lecturer Stephen and his student boyfriend Adam, who become prime suspects. Jane’s mother and her boyfriend, Ruth and Bob, the only straight characters, are a rather clumsy add-on to the main plot. And so you have it: an old-fashioned thriller dressed up as something more. It is, of course, more. It is a knowing pastiche with often throwaway references to William Blake and Jeanette Winterson, to the pulp romance and thriller fiction genres, road movies, and with topographical name-checks that range from the Kings to the Gower. The main problem is that it is so ambitious, trying to combine the thriller, the love story, the gay scene, poetic whimsy, intensity and flippancy, metaphors and the well-made play. We have to remember, too, that most of the characters are teenagers – their immaturity a contrast to the older characters, the familiar Blakean innocence and experience being one of the many subtexts Maybe it’s all part of the play’s postmodern irony, but the ending is unrealistically happy – a joke, a nod to the teenage-fiction subtext, perhaps but either too smart or too silly, as all the ends are tied up. Jane and Bethan make up, Ruth and Bob make up and Stephen and Adams make up. Reconciliation, if you hadn’t guessed, is what it’s all about. . There is, nevertheless, some fine writing in Crossings and a willingness to be both witty and romantic, even if at times the issues (self-harm, love, trust and so on) make it seem like an edgy theatre-in-education piece . Ms Duffy’s links to Wales may be tenuous but it it’s led to this then let’s be grateful to Glamorgan for offering her a place on their MA Playwrighting course (which I assume she passed). Simon Harris’s engaging and intense production includes some explicit male gay sex near the beginning that proves to be exceptional rather than setting the tone for what follows and those who feel uncomfortable with seeing same-sex canoodling should not be too upset: there are gay issues explored here but it is not, I think, a play about sexuality. Saying that, having most of the characters gay is clearly a statement. While most but not all the acting is up to par, Michelle Luther as a confused but passionate Jane, Dylan Williams as the Puck-like Sam and Jamie Newall as a very recognisable Stephen give the production great strength. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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