The tale of the 150-odd Welsh speakers who set off across the Atlantic in 1865 to find new lives for themselves in Patagonia resonates richly in Wales.
In its mixture of bold yearning and tragic naivety, the founding of “Y Wladfa” (the Colony) carries echoes of the Israelites and their quest for the promised land, with the caveat that this land – barren, brutally unyielding – was not by any means as promised.
Marking the settlement’s 150th anniversary, artist Marc Rees, collaborating with National Theatre Wales, the Welsh-speaking Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and broadcaster S4C, has gone big, throwing open the Royal Opera House’s vast storage facility in the Valleys and inviting us to experience epic video installations, music and movement, in a mixture of Welsh, English and Spanish and a promenade-style performance (an Eisteddfod choir and a carefully choreographed lorry are also thrown in).
It is an odd melange, by turns beguiling and frustrating. Rees tells the settlers’ story not directly – grittily done in Mike Pearson’s play Patagonia, which appeared in 1992 at London’s Royal Court – but offers atmospheric fragments: a search for fertile land, the massacre by the previously friendly Mapuche Indians of several young Welsh men.
Individually powerful, collectively they feel like undigested research, particularly for anyone unversed in Y Wladfa’s history or the goings-on of the S4C soap Pobol y Cwm, one of whose stars appears. And despite the dizzying possibilities of the space, packed to the rafters with sets and costumes from hundreds of ROH productions, we barely glimpse any of its contents.
There’s no doubting Rees’s intentions, and NTW is now so experienced at this kind of work that it makes other companies look amateurish, but theatre this big needs substance. Despite glimmers of luminous, haunting beauty, in the end {150} resembles one aspect of the settlers’ experience all too clearly – it’s a bit of a slog.
