At the Royal Court |
| Fiction Factory- Gas Station Angel , Sherman Theatre , June 1, 1998 |
| Ed Thomas's eagerly awaited new play, Gas Station Angel, a joint production by his own company, Fiction Factory, and the Royal Court Theatre in London, also features the presence of other-worldly beings. Fairies take revenge on humans, one boy is believed to be a changeling, another is revered as an angel when brought back to life after having narrowly escaped drowning. But whereas Watkins's characters have to learn to face up to reality, Thomas's dramatis personae fully embrace the world of fantasy and magic as a part of life. The playwright reworks familiar motifs from his previous works: dysfunctional families who are fated by the occurrence of a tragic death; young lovers who attempt to break free from a life without a future; a belief in the power of imagination to reinvent one's self; and a compelling metaphor for a resurrection of Welsh culture. Only this time Thomas lets his play end on a note of hope, for there is a discernible optimism that a young generation may overcome the ghosts of the past and lead a life of self-realisation. Formally, the play combines the strong characterisation of Thomas's early work, most notably House of America, with the conceptual sharpness and lyricism of the later plays, which makes it as emotionally moving as it is intellectually satisfying. The poeticism of the writing, however, produces a strangely non-dramatic effect, for the plot seems of less importance than the way in which the characters interpret and retell it. This creates a narrative complexity which, though maybe undramatic, is nonetheless very theatrical: one is never quite sure whether what is told in the present is a memory of things past or an imagining of the future - an effect which Thomas, as his own director, manages to underline by his fluid staging. Its emphasis on the power of live performance, however, has also exposed the work to fierce criticism. When Fiction Factory took Gas Station Angel to London, the reviewers disliked it mostly for its excess of theatricality: they called it over-indulgent, over-wrought, overlong, over-loud. Many English critics even felt obliged to protect the Welsh from the creation of their fellow countryman, accusing him of colluding in stereotyping Wales as a land of superstition, tribalism and whimsy. The inability to read the work other than on a very literal level is quite astonishing. This literalism led the reviewers to repeat another well-known cliche': that of the over-talkative Welsh. One can only hope that Ed Thomas will not let himself be shut up. |
Reviewed by: Heike Roms |
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