At the Royal Court |
| Fiction Factory- Gas Station Angel , Royal Court Theatre , July 1, 1998 |
| At the other end of the scale of innovative Welsh theatre, Ed Thomas's Fiction Factory produced his new play Gas Station Angel. Whereas Volcano are clearly fascinated by shape and form (of production, of form, of 'the poetics of space'), Thomas despite his protestations otherwise is driven by concerns with transgression and revenge, of myth and illusion, language and imagi nation. He does invite audience identification in the face of a bureaucratic, exploitative world. Because of this, his play (and it is a play) works far better on a small stage I saw Gas Station Angel twice: first in Cardiff on the Sherman's main stage and second in London at the Royal Court Upstairs. The difference was dramatic. At the Sherman I felt distanced from the action, finding the constant recourse to soliloquy dramatically monotonous, the writing striking but overblown. I liked the cavernous stage however and thought the individual actors very strong. In the Royal Court however the smaller stage created a more dynamic performance with the tensions of the text exploding into the restricted space. I still thought the play too long, but in the confined space the soliloquies seemed more ritualised and therefore more exciting. The steep incline of the seating brought the audience closer to the stage and the actors. Siwan Morris in particular stood out as heart-breakingly vulnerable and eager, as did the restless energy of Richard Lvnch. The semi-vertical exits /entrances set at the four corners of the stage allowed the actors to appear and disappear almost as if coming from under the ground: perfect vehicles to express Thomas's interest in the invisible underworlds he explores again and again in his texts. In this play those worlds are expressed in the image of the fairies dispossessed of their land, and the 'tantrum sea' consuming it, both seeking revenge on the Ace family who have dug up ancient sites for farming and polluted the sea with chemicals. Where Volcano disrupt the very fabric of the performance and its relations with the audience, Thomas retains a fairly linear narrative, with discernable characters, a recognisable, if bizarre, love-story, and a repeated concern for individual and cultural identity. When it works it's magnificent engaged drama, wonderfully dismissive, for example, of the banalities of Keith the supervisor who thinks he can only talk to the girl he calls 'checkout one' when he's fucked her, or of the transformation of old pubs into entertainment centres with Karaoke and Bingo, where the new management is 'fucking raking it in'. When it doesn't work it can be tedious sub-Pinter, sub-Kerouac. Thomas's strength however lies in his difference from these writers, particularly, in his confused struggle with Welsh identity, which appears invisible to others. There are no answers to this problem in this play or any of his others, only the question asked jointly by son and father: 'Who can we ever be except... / The sons and daughters of our fathers and mothers.' Or the words he makes his heroine say to his hero: 'To be Welsh at the end of the twentieth century you got to have imagination'. In this confused world we all need imagination. Samuel Palmer got it right over a century a go when he said that 'a bird deprived of its wings is not more incomplete than the human mind without imagination.' We need theatre to exercise that imagination. In view of the Arts Council Wales's current consultation paper on the Arts let us hope that these gymnasia aren't shut down. |
Reviewed by: Jeni Williams |
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