| A Look-back and Guide |
At Wales Millennium Centre |
| Wales Millennium Centre , Wales, Scotland, England, Europe, Australia , June 8, 2024 |
On 9th August 2012 an announcement was made by Conrad Lynch, then Artistic Director: “The next phase in our development as a truly national centre for the performing arts is to produce our own work. In seven years the Centre has successfully established itself as a theatre which stages world class productions, by globally renowned producers, especially in the field of musical theatre and opera. “As we mature our ambition is to produce and present new work, in both languages, to showcase the talent of Wales, as well as to continue to bring the best of the world to Wales.” The Wales Millennium Centre won an award at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. It partnered with the Kiln Theatre, the National Theatre twice, Cape Town Opera, Theatr na n’Óg. Productions are reviewed below: “Nye”: 14th March 2024, 21st March 2024 “Tim Price's drama, big theatre for a big stage, has made for the most enlivened discussion in theatre's first quarter of 2024. Sheen burns with genuine passion. His charisma fills the gaps in the script. This is, unashamedly, a play about principle, passion and compassion, driven by a fantastic ensemble and an electrifying performance from Sheen.” * * * * “Branwen: Dadeni” 17 November 2023 “Ambition shows. In its scale, its design and lighting, the quality of its music and singing “Branwen: Dadeni” could transfer straight to the Lyttelton stage on the South Bank and a national theatre audience would not blink an eyelid. The production values are supreme. “Formally, Elin Steele's design has a lower area for the main actors, and a raised section for the musicians and octet of singers, who function as both chorus and amplifiers of the action. The first act is led by the magnetic duo of Mared Williams' Branwen and Rithvik Andugula's Matholwch. Fine singing too from Tomos Eames as Bendigeidfran, Caitlin Drake as Efnisien and Gillian Elisa as Ena. In the second act Gillian Elisa unleashes a full power not often seen before. Ioan Hefin is a gruesome statuesque Picelle, explicator of time and story and history.” * * * * “Es and Flo”: 22 June 2023 “Jennifer Lunn's opening scene has Liz's Crowther's Esme declaring a seventy-first birthday. The play digs deep into its terrain, the dilemmas for love in life's third chapter, buffeted by medical, familial, financial and legal shock. It is done with finesse but with a studied eye on the medium. “Es and Flo” is theatre that wants to be theatre. “Furniture and wall paper have been unchanged for decades. A Joan Armatrading album sets the vintage. The script soon makes plain that it has been a home for 37 years. The details are evident of travelling spirits: a Collins dictionary, a string of Lonely Planet guides that include Thailand. The set has a surprise to spring in its second act.” * * * * “The Making of a Monster”: 24 November 2022 “Connor Allen’s startling grime-theatre mash-up is as emotionally raw as it is playful and imaginative...an engrossing autobiographical look at growing up mixed-race and fatherless in Newport in the noughties. Performed by Allen, the children’s laureate of Wales, the show begins informally, but gets swiftly to the crux of the matter – identity – and pulls no punches on its way to redemptive climax. “Conrad Murray’s taut production opens with Allen inviting the audience to play pass the parcel. Unwrapping two Action Man dolls – one white, one Black – he playfully explores the positive and negative connotations of those words. From there, to the accompaniment of throbbing music performed by Oraine Johnson on drums perched above the stage, we hurtle through the challenges, crises and shocking bouts of violence on a young man’s journey of self-discovery.” * * * * “The Boy with Two Hearts”: 13 October 2022, 10 October 2021 “Fariba (Houba Echouafni) makes a speech in a school playground against the strictures placed on women. The words set the destiny of her life. “What choice did I have?” Much later she says “Not one since I made that speech. A life with no home, no possessions.” The first part of the tortuous journey is the exit from Herat, three days and nights for the family of five fused in a compartment of the boot of a car. The destination is a Moscow of ferocious cold. “The four thousand mile journey continues ever westward: a bewildered border crossing in a jungle of vegetation, a week on a farm with a diet of stale bread, the airport in Kyiv. New passports are given whereby their very names and nationality must be forfeit. In a camp in Austria the boys play football all day between meals and debate whether they will join Arsenal or Manchester United. They raise more money at work in a German pizza shop. They are repelled on the first attempt to enter the Netherlands, successful on the second. From there it is the trip to the limbo of the Calais settlement, a time of hopes raised and hopes dashed. Floodlights, barking dogs and the shouts of police interrupt the attempt to jump a train. The eventual arrival is an airless squeeze on a pile of containers.” * * * * "Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff"): 23 August 2019: 15 August 2018 “Armed with a beautiful powerpoint packed with some incredible cartoons of the brain and a variety of rat-based experimental anecdotes, performer Carys Eleri rummages through her own past, using her relationships as a way to consider the neurological processes which shape not only what we think about the things that happen to us, but also how they impact upon our memory and wider understanding of the world.” * * * * "Tiger Bay": 16 November 2017: 15 November 2017 “Tiger Bay”, says Graeme Farrow, WMC's artistic leader, “is how musicals used to be.” By that he means it is neither borrowed from a film script nor a catalogue of old hits. It is an original book by Michael Williams set to the music of Daf James. In fact its resemblance to any specific piece in the musical theatre canon is slight. It is closer dramatically to the theatre of a writer like Helen Edmundson. Like her “Coram Boy” its plot involves adults and children in an intensely realised panorama of historical setting. “Back in Butetown Suzanne Packer's Marisha presides over the unique multi-ethnic mix that shifted the coal which fuelled the Empire. The black-suited merchants in the Exchange strike their trades while union strife is fulminating. Suffragettes stride the stage demanding enfranchisement. These scenes have a scale and a vivacity to them to thrill. Melody Squire and Lungelo Ngamlana are joint choreographers. Director Melly Still and co-director Max Barton know exactly what they are doing; cut just at the point when the audience is at its height of enthrallment.” * * * * "Only the Brave": 01 April 2016 “The actors Thomas Aldridge, Karl Queensborough, Max Bowden , Gwydion Rhys, Steffan Lloyd-Evans and David Albury all sunk deep into their roles and all gave, like every artist in this production, totally faultless performances. They were the core at this wonderful ensemble production. “In this unique intelligent production theatricality and reality are perfectly conjoined. We get a big, very moving and rewarding show. Quite one of the best to come out of the eleven year old Millennium Centre. * * * * "Land of Our Fathers": 19 November 2015 “Chris Urch’s characters are six miners but they come without the pall of sentimentality that is the genre’s usual overhang. Made in Wales, that admirable company of the last century, had a rule in its dramaturgical selection- no sagas of doughty mining families. The production comes with a single-sheet cast and creative list, with no details of its dramatist. Urch has that significant advantage for a writer for theatre. He is a trained actor and actors know that words are not the things in themselves but springboard for stage action. “Director Paul Robinson has a strong cast. The action is spread across the characters and acting honours are equal across the generations. John Cording and Cornelius Booth are the mining veterans, Tomos Eames, Joshua Price and Taylor Jay-Davies are the new, and last, generation of miners- the setting is in 1979. Robert Jezek is representative of that first generation of Poles who came to Britain, a veteran of Monte Cassino. Signe Beckman’s design and Hartley Kemp’s lighting together create a potent setting with utter conviction.” * * * * "Man to Man": 29 March 2015 “Ella, given a sublime and captivating performance by Margaret Ann Bain, tells us that her husband Max has continued to work as a crane driver despite his body being wrecked by cancer. We hear of his death through words and the first of the performance’s engaging, poetic movement excellently choreographed by co-director Bruce Guthrie. “She takes us on a seventy-minute journey of German history from just before the ascent of Hitler up until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Manfully swigging beer as she goes. The set allows her to enhance her story telling. She crushes herself into the window, which has become a prison cell. She climbs a wall then takes a chair up with her and sits on it. Extraordinary but it gives the performer opportunity to demonstrate her startling movement and no small amount of comedy ability.” * * * * "Showboat": 23 July 2014 “The first act creates a series of high points around the starkness and emotion of ‘Ol Man River”. Timothy le Roux is creator of the electrifying dance for “Can’t Help Loving Dat Man.” There is a style of rapid change in speed of movement to the choreography that makes it utterly of South Africa. The plot darkens when Nobuntu Mpahlaza takes the lead for her ominous number “Misery’s Coming Round.” The first act closes with “You Are Love” and it sounds a new song in the hands of opera performers Magdalene Minnaar and Blake Fischer. “The singing highlight of the second act is Angela Kerrison’s lament for “Bill.” At its most poignant moment Gareth Jones pauses his baton and the voice sings unaccompanied. The plot, removed in the main to Chicago, is a series of episodic slivers from the novel. Characters rise and fall at speed, meet and re-meet, more commonly by accident than plot logic. The dance high point is a sequence of the Charleston performed at a blurring velocity. Some of the dandies in the ensemble match vertically-striped blazers with socks of horizontal stripes.” * * * * "I'm with the Band": 20 October 2013 “I’m with the Band” is an allegory. Gruff Wales cowers in a box sobbing. His plea to England is “I’ll do whatever you want. You have to look after me.” Near the close Wales and Ireland are sent into spasms in which they lose shirt and trousers. It is a deeply strange, masochistic image for Welsh theatre-makers to portray of Wales within the Union. “The allegory is unclear. Damien England frets because drummer Aaron Northern Ireland has not turned up. But the audience has no idea where it is he is supposed to have decamped to. The last thing the Republic wants is a million Ulstermen upsetting the balance in the Dail. The most animated of the musical numbers, performed with gusto, describes passionate sex with an offstage woman. But it is unclear then whether the drummer represents Ulster as an entity, or whether it is just one community.” * * * * "The Igam Ogam Show": 04 August 2013 “The energy Lauren Lee Jones brings to her character the naughty Igam Ogam is terrific. She has a sparkle in her eye and interacts well with her spirited young audience. She is a very stubborn nearly four, little girl and is convinced she can do everything herself. But climbing in designer, Sean Cavanagh’s design with its exotic forest of banana and sliced bread fruit trees she soon becomes stuck and eventually welcomes the intervention of her monkey friend Roly. “Oris plays Roly and a very engaging, dancing monkey he proves to be. There doesn’t seem to be one part of his body that he is not able spin on. Now Mums and their little ones follow him with wide eyes. He helps Igam Ogam down from her precarious position stuck up in a banana tree and she eventually accepts that two people can enjoy a see-saw made from a giant banana better than one.” * * * * “Ma’ Bili’n Bwrw’r Bronco”: 09 September 2012 “Set on a housing estate in the Swansea Valley, five boys spend the summer of 1983 acting out their dreams and fears in their local park. It’s a summer of play-fighting, Star Wars and their new obsession with bronco’ing, but when their playful banter and bickering is cut short by an unimaginable event, their lives are changed forever. “Produced in collaboration with Theatr na n’Óg , “Ma’ Bili’n Bwrw’r Bronco” was directed by Geinor Styles, Artistic Director of Theatr na n’Óg. The compnay comprised Iesytn Arwel, Rhys Downing, Sion Ifan, Gareth John Bale, Carwyn Jones, Chris Kinahan, Osian Rhys and Dafydd Rhys.” Picture: Es and Flo |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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