First performed in Cardiff in June of 2022 and now restaged for a national tour, Gavin Porter’s Circle of Fifths is a celebratory exploration of grief and the necessity of community ritual as told through the experiences and funeral traditions of the residents of Butetown. A patchwork of live music, film, movement, and storytelling it is a beautiful and often moving portrait of a place and its community.
Porter, along with his performer, musician and storyteller collaborators Shakeera Ahmun, Rose Beecraft Music, Francesca Dimech, Anthony “Drumtan” Ward and Wella guide the proceedings. It begins with a death, leads through to the burial, and ends at a wake, replete with drinks, samosas, and Welsh cakes. Threading together individual testimonies, it unfolds into a meditation on community and parental legacy, a tribute to those who had to find their own square miles, and the importance of maintaining communal traditions in an age when there are fewer of them.
On occasion, the proceedings have a slight tentative, provisional edge. But this is also a work of striking theatrical economy, wholly concrete and unencumbered by dramatic tricks. The performances are never less than heartfelt, and one thing comes after another: a story, a song, a recollection. Dealing as it does with the material stuff of death and the grief of real people, it feels very unmediated and there is an elegance in its assured makeshift nature. Whatever happens we are in safe hands, and those at the front will lead us gently through the dance because they know, as a community always knows, how things should best be done.
This tour is National Theatre Wales’s first fully staged production since Arts Council Wales announced in September a complete cut to the company’s funding. They are in the process of appealing, the result pending, and touring a staged wake feels perhaps grimly ironic. But one can’t help but wonder, as Circle of Fifths gracefully observes, what is a community, or indeed a nation, and what is theatre, other than people coming together to perform small acts of repair, making and maintaining meaning through shared repeated rituals?
• Circle of Fifths is on tour across venues in Wales and then Brixton House, London until 20 January.
