At the National’s Temporary theatre, a girl walks on to a stage surrounded by fluorescent batons (sharp design by Hayley Grindle; lighting Rachel Mortimer). She wears a grey hoodie, has blond hair in a ponytail, distinctive black eyebrows, patterned leggings, silver trainers. She is all spark and swank and aggro. Attack is her best defence and she turns on us, her mouth a savagely lopsided scowl: “You think I’m a stupid slag… Guess whaa?”
Iphigenia in Splott (a district in Cardiff) is Gary Owen’s modern take on the Greek myth. It is a Welsh production that was a hit in Edinburgh and is a tremendous piece of storytelling about a girl struggling to survive in austerity Britain. Effie is either drinking herself senseless or drugged to numbness. We watch her surface, in perilous flashes. She meets Lee, a soldier wounded by an IED in Afghanistan and her life, she believes, is starting. Her short-lived discovery of what it means to love is all the more moving for being wrested out of oblivion. This is a one-woman marathon and a phenomenal performance by Sophie Melville, incisively directed by Rachel O’Riordan. And it ends with a call to revolution. My only criticism is that the final state-of-the-nation rounding off sounds more a polemic from Gary Owen than from F-off Effie. From her mouth, it does not quite ring true.
