On Bear Ridge
*****
Tue 24 September, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
Is this a golden age of Welsh playwriting? Even if it is, Wales doesn’t quite seem to realise it. From Rachel Trezise’s abortion drama Cotton Fingers and the plays of Tim Price, to Gary Owen’s critically-acclaimed Violence and Son, contemporary Welsh theatre has managed to elbow its way to the forefront of the UK scene. But after last year’s backlash against National Theatre Wales (in which more than 200 actors and writers signed a letter criticising the company’s poor output and bias towards non-Welsh actors), the future of our national theatre was left hanging in the balance. With their 2019 programme, which begins with On Bear Ridge, it seems like the concerns of those signatories have been taken on board.
Ed Thomas — perhaps best known as the co-creator of BBC’s bilingual detective drama Hinterland, which transplanted Scandi noir to the Welsh countryside — returns with the first play he’s written in 15 years. He is known for his gritty yet lyrical deconstructions of Welsh national identity, or what remains of it. In House of America (1988), Thomas demonstrated the need for an indigenous national culture by following a group of South Walian teenagers who identify more with American culture and the 1950s Beat Generation than the iconography and literature of their own country. The themes of that play continue to resonate with 21st-century Wales. They also find their way into On Bear Ridge, directed by the playwright alongside Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court.
On a barren, rocky hillside stands an abandoned shop, Bear Ridge Stores. It’s where John Daniel (Rhys Ifans) and Noni (Rakie Ayola) have lived and worked for decades, and they are determined to remain in their place. But times have changed. “One minute we had customers,” they say. “The next minute there was no-one.” The ‘old language’ of their mother tongue is dying a painful death. The country is divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’. And, outside, the sounds of overhead planes and faraway bombs ring out. But when a stranger (Jason Hughes) arrives in the middle of the night with a gun in his hand, it becomes apparent that the situation is a lot more desperate than they thought.
Uncompromising and poetic, Thomas’s writing dangles us over the abyss and then pulls us back from the edge, with his characteristically earthy brand of humour. There are shades of Samuel Beckett in his taste for the absurd and the existential, but his work is always firmly rooted within a distinctly Welsh context. John Hardy’s score uses mysterious Welsh language throat-singing to call back a tribal, folkloric past. Cai Dyfan’s ramshackle set design slowly disappears between scenes, revealing a grey, snow-capped wasteland.
It’s a stellar cast that save the play from becoming too fatalistic, with alternating moments of hilarity and tension. Rakie Ayola is simply magnificent as the wistful yet steadfast Noni, mourning the absence of her Philosophy student son Twm Shenkin, who taught her to think for herself. Sion Daniel Young provides commendable support as family friend Ifan William, while Jason Hughes has a mercurial presence as the Captain, his trust in ordinary people diminished with the changes his land has undergone. But Rhys Ifans is unmistakably the highlight: a blistering, visceral and monstrously funny performer, whose character veers between extreme rage, crushing grief and uproarious comedy.
A staggering achievement; I have no bones declaring that On Bear Ridge is probably one of the best plays to come out of 21st-century Wales — a bleak yet blackly funny meditation on the state of post-Brexit Wales and the irreversible trauma of language death. As the writer told Buzz in a recent interview, it should also be taken as a rallying cry for the nation’s emerging writers and artists to come together and “engage, engage, engage!”
words Sam Pryce
On Bear Ridge is on at the Sherman Theatre until Sat 5 Oct. It then transfers to London’s Royal Court Theatre from Thu 24 Oct – Sat 23 Nov. Info: www.shermantheatre.co.uk