All’s Well That Ends Well

Perhaps it’s wrong to express surprise at having thoroughly enjoyed some Shakespeare, but I really hadn’t expected “All’s Well That Ends Well” at the Royal National Theatre (this year’s birthday treat) to be such jolly fun. No massive stars on display, but some familiar faces (Clare Higgins, Oliver Ford Davies, Michael Thomas, Janet Henfrey), with the meatiest roles taken by Conleth Hill (Parolles, lusty buffoon) and Michelle Terry (Helena, feisty heroine), in a star-making turn. It’s known as a problem play, because of its illogical ending (Bertram, the young nobleman, having spent the entire play running away from the besotted Helena, to the point of going to war, suddenly decides to give in, merely because she happens to be pregnant with his child), but it all seemed to make sense here, thanks to some clever visual touches such as judicious use of silhouettes, animated backdrops and symbolic costume-changes (the Bunny-style outfits were an especially nice touch). The 1110-seating Olivier auditorium was virtually full (it being a matinee, full of pensioners), and there was much laughter, most of it prompted by Hill. Director Marianne Elliot kept things moving, and even made a virtue of those unavoidable moments where there were a lot of people hanging about with nothing to do. A grand day out.

Most pleasing rediscovery, courtesy of a cheaply purchased Charlie Chaplin DVD box-set: “Monsieur Verdoux”; witty, charming and politically provocative, even today. Not to mention “The Great Dictator”, lest we forget.

Egin / Osborne

I went to see a couple of shows in this year’s “Springboard/Egin” season – Sherman Cymru’s short (certainly shorter than the last one) festival of new work for theatre - both penned by fellow members of the “Exquisite Corpse” team.

The first was Lacuna, written by Matthew Bulgo, and directed by Suzanne Phillips, which depicts sessions between a traumatised patient - who seems in perfect physical and mental health, with the exception that the lacuna of the title is her lover, whom she can no longer see - and a suspiciously over-invested doctor. One could readily imagine how the clever premise could have led us up an arty cul-de-sac, but mercifully the author kept it on a deeply relatable level, with heart-breaking, poetic dialogue (perhaps occasionally over-written); and the performances, by Gareth Milton and Caitlin Richards, were affecting and witty.

A couple of nights later saw another play about emotional voids – Tracy Harris’ The Cloak Room (a more fully realised staging than Lacuna, directed by Amy Hodge), in which Roger Evans played a psychologically troubled man who steals coats and invests them with the imagined personalities of people he has lost, and Siwan Morris the woman who tries to redeem him. Again, very lyrical and moving, although the female character’s motivation remained obscure (but then, such is life). It will be performed again as part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Welsh Event in Washington D.C. in a few weeks time – very fitting as a representative sample of theatrical writing in contemporary South Wales.


The latest in the On The Edge season at Chapter featured a double bill of new plays – “A Pair of Cardiff Shorts” - by local legend Alan Osborne, one of the progenitors of the profane, poetic, surrealistic South Wales style. The first, “The Best Defensive Boxer In The Bay! Nay, The World” is about a pugilist whose aim is to become the world champion loser; the second, a less broadly humorous, more abstract piece, “Until, Box and Sometimes Sally”, has as its hero a blind man whose friends tell him stories to stir (or maybe constrain) his visual imagination. Despite the fact that these were script-in-hand readings, director Russell Gomer kept things moving admirably, and the cast (Nathan Sussex as the related central protagonists of both pieces, as well as Boyd Clack, Dean Rehman, Cler Stephens and Mali Tudno Jones) ably conveyed the pathos and humour in both pieces. More stimulation in a little under an hour than an entire season of Big Brother could provide.

Scott Matthews

It is a truth acknowledged by all right-thinking people that “Elusive” by Scott Matthews is one of the finest songs of the 21st century thus far. So I leapt at the chance to see him when he visited Cardiff’s Glee Club last night, and I was not disappointed. Supporting was James Summerfield, whose accomplished acoustic country-folk stylings went down well, and did his football-related banter. The headliner’s ethereal, multi-textured soulful folk/blues was received ecstatically by the capacity crowd, and the new songs were every bit as compelling as his older material. Scott Matthews (a.k.a. the Wolverhampton Wonder) stands manfully on the shoulders of Jeff Buckley and John Martyn; one only hopes he takes better care of his personal welfare than they did.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the launch party for the new English-language National Theatre of Wales, in Cardiff’s Castle Arcade, last week - I hadn’t been invited, but was very kindly snuck in by younger, more successful writers. It was an intriguing collection of people, of both the arty and moneyed varieties. The new company certainly has some exciting plans - such as a production a month for the first year, starting in Spring 2010 - and a promising on-line forum. Let’s hope the inevitable whingeing doesn’t bring them down too much.

The reviews for the London production of “The Exquisite Corpse” have been less rapturous than those it received in Edinburgh last year, but I’d put that down to the world-weariness of the metropolitan critic. The write-ups have generally been of the kind which would tend to intrigue potential audiences (“this is weird”), rather than put them off entirely (“this is bad”), and the company seem quite pleased with the houses they’ve been getting.

Gary Owen has published the Welsh-language dialogue from his bilingual play “Amgen : Broken” on his website, and it turns out that I understood even less of it that I’d previously thought, to the point of entirely misreading the trajectory of the “Gareth” character; thus his “crisis” is altogether more upbeat than that of his English-only alter-ego; which makes it even more appropriate as a “what it is to be Welsh” play than I originally thought.

Linguistic Fluidity

Last Saturday saw another Writers’ Guild event, in the Sherman Cymru, Cardiff. In conjunction with their production of Gary Owen’s “Amgen: Broken”, it was a forum discussion on the subject of Bilingualism in Drama, chaired by noted Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands, and with guest speakers (alongside Gary), Jeroen Van Den Berg (a Dutch playwright who has worked with a Frysian-language theatre company in Holland) and Dominic Rai (the Indian-born founder of the Mán Melá Theatre company, now resident in Wales). The general consensus was that linguistic fluidity is the future of society and therefore, of any dramatic writing which aims to reflect it with any degree of authenticity. “Amgen” is artistically successful, because, as the author explained, it uses the learning of the Welsh language as a metaphor for personal transformation; and there was agreement that playwrights should be encouraged to work multilingually, when the subject of drama called for such an approach (e.g. social inclusion, linguistic oppression, generational conflict). The problem in Wales though, appears to be that work is often criticised on the basis of the “correctness” of the Welsh used, rather than its relevance and verisimilitude as drama, and that bureaucratic considerations preclude the production of work (especially on TV) that reflects the bilingual reality of most Welsh-speaking communities. The limited number of opportunities, particularly in television, for non-Welsh-speaking writers in Wales was also brought up.

A couple of days later, I paid a visit to London village to check out the latest production of “The Exquisite Corpse” (I am one of the five co-writers) at the Southwark Playhouse, and was blown away once more by the slickness and coherent incoherency of the production. I’m proud to be even a small part of such an aesthetically ambitious project, for which my biennial visit to the Tate Modern was the ideal preparation.

I loved the new J.J. Abrams "Star Trek" film – particularly the depiction of the developing relationships between the principals; some lovely, surprisingly nuanced performances. Slightly concerned about the “alternative timeline” scenario, which could easily have laid waste to any pretence of subtlety; and towards the climax, when CGI threatened to take over, I found myself losing concentration, but that’s probably an age thing.

"Amgen : Broken"

There’s a cliché in these parts that the perennial subject for Welsh drama is “What it is to be Welsh”, and the pre-publicity for Sherman Cymru’s production of Gary Owen’s “Amgen : Broken” (“amgen” meaning “alternative) seems to suggest that it touches explicitly on this theme, with its two characters being versions of the same person :- depressed, English-speaking “Gary” (played by Steven Meo); and the ostensibly less depressed, more complacent, more successful “Gareth” (Simon Watts), who has chosen, at a crucial point in his life, to become a Welsh-speaker. It’s a subtler piece than that, though, eloquently mining the depths of personal and social despair whilst remaining funny and engaging. As an experiment in bi-lingual theatre (about a third of the dialogue being in Welsh), it succeeds to the extent that it allows monoglot audience-members to identify with “Gary’s” feelings of exclusion and alienation while gaining tantalising hints as to the nature of “Gareth’s” parallel journey, an apparently smoother one which nevertheless brings him to a moment of near-terminal unhappiness as poignant as that of his counterpart. It goes without saying that the performances were excellent, and I particularly liked the set – strewn with discarded carrier-bags and fast-food wrappings. I think I may have missed a beat, however, in terms of the events which led to “Gary’s” final crisis of confidence, but I was probably distracted by the smoke.

The hit Edinburgh production to which I made a small but vital (my perspective only) contribution, “The Exquisite Corpse” is about to have its London opening, at the Southwark Playhouse which, apparently, is not quite in the West End. I look forward to seeing how it’s looking these days.

Dirty Protest - Back To The Yurt / "Yer Blues"

Thursday night saw another mini-festival of short plays, in the yurt at the rear of Milgi in City Road, Cardiff. This latest Dirty Protest, guest-curated by playwright Gary Owen, comprised three comic takes on relationships, two heartfelt monologues and a WWII drama, from authors Duncan MacMillan, Cath Tregenna, Emma Reeves, Emily Steel, Greg Glover and cherry popper Ross Southard, very ably performed by Shekira Johnson, Jenny Livsey, and DP regular Gareth Milton. The pieces were variously amusing, thought-provoking and elegiac (sometimes all at the same time); and the fact that both presentations sold out very early on in the evening is a testament to the DP organisation’s success in creating an event which is both highly popular (perhaps too popular in terms of the audience’s physical comfort) and artistically satisfying.

I’ve managed, via youwriteon.com, to make my novel, “Yer Blues”, available for purchase on Amazon – hurry, while stocks last!

Watchmen, and that

I wandered into Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” adaptation, without any prior knowledge of the graphic novel, other than that gleaned during the marketing push, and vague snippets picked up over the years. I enjoyed it rather more than I expected to, given that some critics had complained of longueurs (although these seem to be the kind of critics who find long stretches of non-CGI-enhanced dialogue somehow offensive). The use of a non-A-list cast meant that the fate of the characters was unpredictable, and the dingy 1980’s look was very evocative, especially when contrasted with the shiny sci-fi elements. Some interesting philosophical points as well, e.g. how much easier it is to be yourself when you’re being somebody else, sacrificing the few to protect the many, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a premiere screening of “Zig Zag Love”, a film for BBC Scotland produced by members of the “Tracy Beaker” team. Like a lot of writer Mary Morris’ work, it deals with challenged young people struggling to live “normal” lives, and it was tear-jerking stuff, with lots of effective comic moments and an excellent cast. The evening provided much opportunity to ponder on why such initiatives are not happening here in Wales.

This last weekend, I was part of a workshop at London’s Soho Theatre, organised by the Arts Council of England’s Young People’s Participatory Theatre project, looking, along with a group of c.17-22 year-olds with an interest in the performing arts (and YOCA), at ways of creating a piece of theatre, utilising verbatim elements, which looks at the “gangs/guns/knives” issue, without producing the kind of preachy or despairing tract which people might go to see out of guilt or duty. I’m not sure that we came to any solid conclusions, but it was certainly very stimulating.

The mystery of a payment I received from BBC Radio Cymru for a broadcast from the 2008 National Eisteddfod has been solved – it turns out that Sion Ifan won the Richard Burton Memorial Prize for dramatic performance using an extract from my play “Giant Steps” (as well as one by Dafydd Huws, who filled me in). Glad to be of service.

Sad to hear of the tragic death of Natasha Richardson. She was particularly impressive in Volker Schlonforff's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", and Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst". Respect is due.