"Calendar Girls" / "Crave" / David Nash etc

The latest big touring show that I’ve been able to see at the Wales Millennium Centre was the musical adaptation of nude-posing-housewives comedy-drama “Calendar Girls” featuring a starry cast and not-quite-stellar tunes from Take That’s Gary Barlow. Suitably amusing and moving, it went down very well with the overwhelmingly female audience.

Also on were two largely devised pieces: “Shooting Rabbits” from Powderhouse at the Sherman was a vaguely hallucinogenic depiction of the experience of Welshmen volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, featuring an excellent live score from Sam Humphreys; and “When It Clicks”, from graduate company Golden Sock in the basement of Little Man Coffee Company – a well-acted but dramatically unsatisfying take on Stockholm Syndrome.

The undoubted highlight of the week was Sarah Kane’s “Crave”, produced under the Professional Pathways scheme at The Other Room, and featuring a talented cast of drama students. The play has no real narrative, and it’s a deeply pessimistic insight into its unhappy author’s frame of mind, but it’s a powerfully cathartic experience, akin to listening to a suite of sad songs (R.I.P. Scott Walker).

"Crave" Poster

And only today, I went to the recently opened and impressively extensive exhibition of largely tree-based sculptures by legendary North Wales-based artist David Nash at the National Museum of Wales. A beautiful evocation of the possibilities which open up when Man develops a creative rather than destructive relationship with the natural world. And it even has a wholesome odour about it.