IF you want to stay abreast of one of Cardiff's hottest young theatre companies, the best place to do it is not South Wales, but Glasgow. The only place to see Theatr Y Byd's Blue Heron in the Womb in 1998 is the Tron Theatre. Ian Rowland's play is making its premiere in Scotland, staying here for two weeks, then being put on ice until a Welsh tour next year.
The reason is strategic. The Tron wanted to co-commission a new play after being delighted by last year's Herald Angel-award winning Marriage of Convenience, a beautifully written one-man show about the reactionary forces at work in Welsh society. Theatr Y Byd wanted to cement its relationship with the theatre but couldn't come next year because of the Tron's forthcoming lottery-funded refurbishment. It was now or never.
The fact that both the press officer and the lighting designer are Scottish should not be read as a watering down of the company's deep-rooted Welsh identity. It's notable, however, that as it earns a wider reputation, so Theatr Y Byd is beginning to straddle national barriers. Together with the Tron and theatres in Wales and southern Ireland, the company is planning a performance programme for the year 2000, which will bring together a playwright from each of the three countries. It'll be called Stages of Independence,
and will explore the new political landscapes of the Celtic countries.
''Our relationship with the Tron has been so productive,'' says Ian Rowlands. ''Hopefully this is also a step towards Stages of Independence, which will be a cross-cultural, multilingual thing for the millennium. We premiered a play in Dublin once, and to premiere a work outside of your country is always really interesting. But I can only be true to what I want to write, and I'm not a great believer in tailoring products to the market.
I've written what I feel
my heart is in at the moment, and if what is portrayed is universal then it will be communicable to a Scottish audience.''
Blue Heron in the Womb is the final part of what the playwright terms a ''trilogy of appropriation''. His concern is with the way men have traditionally taken control of the family, society, and of language itself, and he argues that a forward-looking nation must cast off the inequitable male patterns of the past.
Driven by a very black sense of humour, the play is a tragedy of Greek proportions, about love, sex, families, and death.
''The type of theatre I've been producing is very visual, and quite stylised,'' says Rowlands, who is also directing. ''Some people
have termed it the 'theatre
of ideas'. I'm not interested in naturalistic characters, I'm interested in aspects of
a debate.
''In Blue Heron in the Womb the debate is about the hypocrisy of the non-conformist middle class.
Now that we're going towards the new millennium, with Scotland and Wales having new assemblies, new voices, we need to re-look at society and get rid of the reactionary elements.''
Rowlands is conscious of the irony that he, as a director and writer, is a controlling male making criticisms of other controlling males. He says he can only point out the arguments from his own perspective. ''Men need to redefine what is happening in society, and it has to come through education,'' he says. ''I abhor patriarchal systems of control that are put upon families, that are put upon women. As a man, I don't have the answers, I merely pose the questions. Am I happy continuing the mistakes that have been made in my family in the generations up to my birth? As men, the language we speak weaves webs around everybody. We use language to protect ourselves, to contain women, to contain nature, to contain our children. We must stop appropriating.''
n Blue Heron in the Womb, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thursday to May 30. There is a Herald Replay discussion following Friday's performance.
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