Tuck ★★★★★

Reit, co ni off te! (Pun intended) Sa’i erioed wedi trial ysgrifennu adolygiad bilingual o’r blaen – but after seeing the glorious Tuck at Wales Millennium Centre last night (a diodde hangover effing ofnadw heddi) I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m a Welshy Welsher, but my half-German husband isn’t – yet we both understood, both got it (I did have to translate one particularly rude joke into English for him!) I fod yn onest, o’n i wrth fy modd yn eistedd right in the front (eye-to-crotch level). Beth o’n i ddim yn disgwyl though, oedd y dyfnder ac amrywiaeth o emosiynau. Laughter, yes of course; but crying? No I wasn’t expecting to cry. The scene where they were going through clothes, man alive! O’n i’n llefain fel babi. “I just want to smell her.”

What can I say about the music? Odd e’n ffantastig. I thought I knew Stifyn Parri, then he goes and does this. Ffocin el de (fel ma nhw’n dweud lan yn y Gogs)! He was so good. They all were.

I haven’t enjoyed a theatre experience as much as this since I saw Charlotte Church’s Last Mermaid.

Everything was on point, okkurr.

★★★★★ Pump sêr. Five stars. I would say go and see it, but I think it’s sold out. Good. Odd e’n ffuckin excellent.

Alun, Mared, Jess a’r criw wedi warae blinder ‘da hwn. Methu aros gweld beth sy’ nesa’.

#TUCKtheplay

neontopia.co.uk/tucktheplay

Charlotte Church - The Last Mermaid - review

★★★★★ - five stars

I'm nearly at a loss for words. I don't think I've ever been to the theatre and enjoyed myself so much. I made a  venn diagram of some of the influences I could see last night:

I wasn't aware that it was a kid's show until today. It certainly kept the adults entertained, as it worked on more than one level. 

The set design and lighting was beautiful. Shimmery shiny, gossamer silk, seaweed and water... the costumes were gorgeous. sumptuous, on point and decadent. Church was obviously moved by Dylan Thomas' words in Under Milk Wood, the whispered opening lines sounded like Thomas. The three singers/dancers who represented the sea, sang in unison, like a Greek chorus. The first movement was just beautiful: frenetic, but restrained. Energy contained, and controlled. Then when the last mermaid was released from her (shell? Womb?) the music and dancing was glorious.

The plastic bag dance was perfect, and hinted at the eco message of the play. Is it a play? It is, by turns, a dance, a play, an opera, a mime performance, a puppet show. It is all of these things, and none. A whole that is so much greater than its parts. The drowning fisherman moved like a man underwater - I forgot I was in a theatre, I thought I was viewing a huge water tank. The man who played him should be nominated for some sort of underwater dancing award.

The whale! Oh my days, the whale. I loved the tenor and bass singers who sang the whale, I loved their costumes, and I loved the projected presentation of the whale. A little boy sat next to me, tugged his Mum's sleeve and said "Mammy! Eye!" before he dropped his marshmallows. I genuinely had goosebumps when the whale turned her into a human - then laughed out loud at the bit on the beach. "My legs. My legs in the sun!"

My friend Nina described the next movement as "the Depeche Mode bit", I described it as "the Kraftwerk/Daft Punk bit". It was a spectacular spectacular.

Then things got a bit darker. The last mermaid's cries of "my whale" brought tears to my eyes. Church's voice was at its strongest and surest here, full of grief and love.

I won't give away the ending, it was beautiful. None of the story was overtold. None of it was laid on thick. You either got it, or you didn't. And even if you didn't, you were swept along anyway.

It was fucking magnificent. I want the LP soon please, Charlotte.

A Provincial Life – Sherman Theatre Cardiff

I was very excited to go and see this play, my first time in the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff since it has been renovated. Renovated is totally the wrong word, it has been re-made, and it’s beautiful! A lovely bar and waiting area, the theatre was amazing, and the toilets were super clean!

I don’t think I had ever seen a Peter Gill play before last night, and I don’t think I’ll bother going to see another. A Provincial Life is based on Chekhov’s story My Life, where an educated, privileged young man struggles with his conscience and decides to become a worker. The Sherman’s blurb told me it was about a struggle for equality, but I felt it was more about the class divide than a struggle. The only characters who seemed to be concerned about equality were Misail, the protagonist, and the Doctor (can’t remember his name).

The staging was brilliant. All the characters would carry in the props – tables and chairs – at the start of every scene, and carry them out again at the end. It was bare and bleak, and fitted the story perfectly. The costumes and props were amazing; it’s always satisfying to hear a saucepan lid clang as it is supposed to. Sadly, that is all the praise I can give it. The acting was shockingly amateur, and the whole thing had the air of a school production. The play did feature some big Welsh names: William Thomas is one of my favourite actors. His performance was undoubtedly the best, which only served to make the younger members of the cast look even worse. The big names: William Thomas, Helen Griffin, Ieuan Rhys (or Glyn the Policeman, as I will always think of him) and rent-a-Welsh-granny Menna Trussler, acted the rest off the stage – yet they were given a scant few lines. The exception being Clive Merrison, who was as hammy and over the top as usual.

Nicholas Shaw, as protagonist Misail, wasn’t very good at all. I don’t know if it was his real accent, or if putting an accent on was giving him trouble, but he had an intermittent speech impediment that made it hard to listen to him. He made several speeches with his back to half the audience, and stumbled over quite a few lines. He started his lines early, and also made a rather huge mistake in his final soliloquy: his sister was pregnant and had been expecting a boy, but she died and he now looked after his niece. In his speech he said “my sister was convinced it was going to be a girl, but the child was a boy”. He got mixed up and mixed up the line. Shoddy. He also had a very annoying habit of smiling at the end of many of his lines, not at anyone in particular, just a smile which did not fit with the line or the situation.

I can’t apportion all the blame of a bad play on the actors, the fault lies with the writer. Even superb actors like William Thomas can only do so much with bad lines (but actors as bad as Clive Merrison take them to new levels of horror!) Gill’s dialogue is stilted and incomplete. Characters hardly conversed in the play, they merely spoke sentences, sometimes those sentences related to the last sentence another character spoke, but we were lucky to have that happen – most of the time they were unrelated nonsense: “I have to put my boots away”, “They have turned me into a house-keeper”.

The characters did not show any emotion either; they spoke aloud how they were feeling. I am so tired, I am worried, I have had enough... I thought everyone had heard about show don’t tell. Not Gill, it seems. There were also long periods of silence while the actors either walked around the stage, or folded picnic blankets or pretended to drink tea. It was amateurish, and very dull to watch. Gill obviously knows Chekhov’s story intimately, forgetting that perhaps his audience aren’t as familiar with it. I certainly wasn’t. So he glosses over parts of the story, as I know one must when adapting for a different medium, but he neglected to explain things sufficiently – this was balanced with a desire to include other ridiculous details to the detriment of the plot. The train guard Ivan might be an important character in the novella, but he is superfluous in the play. I suspect he’s there to provide comic relief, but Gill’s clumsy attempts at humour come off as just that, attempts. The brief moments of humour in Gill’s play are not the dark, bitter humour one finds in Chekhov’s work. The subplot of Ivan’s mother having an affair with Moesi (no idea how to spell that name) and Ivan subsequently chasing him with a gun, is never developed further than that. The audience is given a glimpse at a story, then it simply stops. I would rather Gill had erased that character and back story and had more with Andrei Ivanov (played by wonderful William Thomas).

At the end, I clapped as that is only polite, but the cast took so long in coming out to bow, that the clapping nearly died out before Nicolas Shaw had even come back on stage. As I walked home, a young couple who’d also been to see the play summed it up perfectly. She turned to him and said “Well, that wasn’t very good, was it?”

Back (in black)

Back once again, but not a renegade master.

Back, but not quite better.

Today:
Don't Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns, wrote 10 Pages of my play Sleep/Jungle when I was in work (but I'm leaving in 6 days), Kath made me cry, more things made me cry, I have flu. Thought of owls, then of Ryan.

Re-reading Sarah.

Kissed Bethan twice

Back of GWAWR’S car. GARETH and EMYR don’t wear seatbelts.

GWAWR You two okay back there? You’re awful quiet.

GARETH Yes Mam. (To EMYR.) Go on, what did she say?

EMYR Nothin’, she just ‘eld my ‘and…

GWAWR ‘Ow’s your Auntie Brenda, Emyr, after ‘er operation?

EMYR (Deadpan.) Fine thank you Mrs Hughes. (To Gareth.) Oh my

God, Gar, it was amazin’.

GARETH Is she a good kisser then?

EMYR Yeah, she fuckin’ a…

GWAWR (Loudly.) Emyr Thomas! Did I hear you swearing?

EMYR No Mrs Hughes! (Sniggers.)

GWAWR (Smiling.) Lucky for you I didn’t then, isn’t it?