“The most hated man in Wales”; “the Welsh James Joyce”. Opinions about Caradoc Evans (1878-1945) have been divided for the past century, since he published My People - a collection of caustic stories about an imaginary, nonconformist rural community. His characters are sketched in acid-sharp prose; the harshness of their lives and the cruelty and hypocrisy of their chapel-oriented society is portrayed with biting humour. Evans makes grotesque situations appear hyperreal by rooting them in a rich dialect that seems to spring from the earth (in fact, it is highly stylised and artificial). Steffan Donnelly’s clever adaptation, which he co-directs with Aled Pedrick, preserves much of Evans’s language and translates his extraordinary blend of fact and fiction to the stage by introducing striking expressionist instants into naturalistic-style action.
Cécile Trémolières’s design similarly plays with this sense of duality. Relocated to the present, the stories are set inside a bright, cheerful chapel. Through the windows patterning its high walls we see a distant idyll of hills and lakes. When the Minister (sly Hugh Thomas) introduces a copy of My People to illustrate a sermon on “criticism”, the characters escape from the pages and fill the space with “violence, bad caricatures and slander”. Hills and lakes slide aside, revealing plotters scheming (Rhys Meredith’s Joshua seizing his sister’s land) or half-hidden horrors (Valmai Jones’s old woman gnawed by rats). Objects shift functions: a chest becomes a graveyard, filling with children; the floor opens into a series of rock pools for a seaside seduction.
Sometimes the multi-stranded plotting becomes confusing and, for me, modernising the stories and confining them within the chapel diminishes, instead of enhances, their stark universality. Nonetheless, Theatr Clwyd and Invertigo Theatre’s joint production is entertaining and shocking, with even the strangest transformations seamlessly effected by the multiple-role-playing cast of six under Siân Williams’s sharply focused movement direction.
