I SAW the new production of this “little gem of play” (to quote director Louise Osborn) in the Weston Studio of Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre, which I suspect was not a good idea, especially during Remembrance Week.
Really this Hijinx three-hander has been made as a community play, which has just completed a two-month tour of local centres rather than theatres, and as a small-scale, accessible, audience-friendly show it works well.
But staging it in front of a young, theatregoing audience it becomes clear very soon that this is a clever, multi-layered work that could, in fact, hold its own in any theatre as a critique of bourgeois society. With a few tweaks Paul Swift’s play (originally commissioned by Rhondda-based Spectacle Theatre more than 20 years ago) would be a sharp-edged political tragicomedy floating somewhere between Arnold Wesker and Sara Kane.
It’s set at the outbreak of the Great War and centres on the hard life of farmer’s wife Megan, whose husband Rhys has volunteered and left her to run the farm and look after their new baby. Her life is upended when she gives shelter to Bill, a conscientious objector on the run from the army. Bill soon shares Megan’s bed, even after he is forced to dress and act as her female cousin from Cardiff.
Thus the added force of staging the play in Cardiff when poppies are everywhere. War poet Wilfred Owen’s bitterly sardonic Dulce et Decorum Est is reprinted in the programme and Bill’s defence of pacifism and condemnation of the militarist adventure is powerful.
It was a brave decision to confront the prevailing mood of the times with this high-profile presentation, but The Other Woman is about much more than anti-war positioning: it is a passionate and intelligent tale of transgression and oppression, its discordant tone echoed effectively in Lucy Rivers’s musical score.
Ms Osborn’s production lays out the issues and undoubtedly engages us but perhaps has softened a tough and uncomfortable story to move but not overly disturb her target audience.
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