…Or, I Kissed An Ape and I Liked It
Barmouth, Gwynedd
Sat 3 July
A minor misunderstanding between our bus driver and the 16 theatre-goers on an excursion from Cardiff to Barmouth meant that our journey took a little longer than we’d imagined. To be more accurate, by the time we realised we were closer to Birmingham than Barmouth, we’d travelled 60 miles in the wrong direction, and our three-hour Victorian excursion had ballooned into a six-hour odyssey, complete with a panicked, white-knuckle ride through some of the most scenic countryside in Wales.
Luckily, we arrive on site just in time to be ushered into Barmouth town hall for the opening scene: a thrilling, tabletop dance from an old sea-dog that sets the tone for a play that blends fact and fiction, past and present in a surreal journey through space and time.
For Mountain, Sand and Sea is a promenade performance that takes its audience on a sprawling journey through Barmouth, recounting stories from the town’s extraordinary past along the way. As we journey through the town, we are treated to a series of vignettes illustrating scenes from Barmouth’s past, interspersed with narration from Marc and the town’s inhabitants. Stories of exiled Parisians, the birth of the National Trust, and the body of an elephant buried somewhere beneath the sand are all relayed. We hop from Victorian England to the swinging sixties in the time it takes to move from an old draper to the Las Vegas amusement arcade.
It’s a dreamy, immersive spectacle with a distinctly magical realist aesthetic, and part of the reason it works so well is surely because Barmouth itself is such an anachronism. Formerly a thriving tourist village, it’s full of pic’n’mix shops, amusement arcades, Victorian pubs and quaint little cottages. A sign in a shop window reads ‘We can no longer accept the Elgar £20 notes as banks have stopped taking them’. You suspect it hasn’t changed much in decades. In this mélange of stories young and old, the present plays second fiddle to the past, and holidaymaking Brummies soaking up the sun and listening to Café del Mar on their phones become a part of the performance.
Marc Rees, dressed for the most part in a fabulous blue linen bell-bottomed suit from the 60s, is out to take advantage of this weird setting by toying with his audience as much as possible. We form a kazoo marching band to lead a paper elephant in procession along the coastal road. We wear beards. In a bizarre scene that links Kim Hunter and Darwin’s Origin Of Species, I am kissed by an ape. Like a mad scientist, Marc has extracted all of the extraordinary moments in this town’s history, swabbed them over a Petri-dish, and let his audience pore over the thriving colony. For a few hours, the town lives and breathes as we thread through its alleys and roads, up hills, over bridges, into buildings.
The only real criticism that could be leveled at this excursion through time and space is that it doesn’t possess any central narrative; instead, we are treated to a kind of selective history of the town. It is not so much the destination that matters, the play tells us, but the journey itself. A shame we hadn’t grasped that nugget of wisdom a few hours earlier as we careered hopelessly down the M5 towards Manchester.