Hari Berrow talks to Tamar Williams, who with theatre company Struts & Frets has devised Y Mabinogi – an ambitious show, aimed at school audiences, that seeks to cover all four branches of the Mabinogion inside an hour.
Aimed at children in late Key Stage 2, Y Mabinogi seeks to educate young Welsh audiences on their culture while also providing an exhilarating theatrical experience. When it came to condensing each of the great book’s four branches into a one-hour show, London’s Struts & Frets Theatre, plus the production’s director Tamar Williams, had to be picky about what stayed in and what did not.
“We really wanted there to be an overall narrative arc,” she explains; “because of the way the branches work, there isn’t really an overall narrative, but there is one character who appears in all four, which is Rhiannon. She’s a goddess who travels from her world – the Other World – to our world to marry a mortal man. The hook that she gives us is really, really powerful, so that’s why we settled on her as our central figure.”
Williams felt it was important to her that the female characters within the stories took a more prominent role. “The female characters in the Mabinogi get quite a short shrift a lot of the time’, she tells me. ‘Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers, Branwen, and of course Rhiannon – we really wanted to give them time and let them tell their own stories.”
The conflict between Rhiannon and the Grey King is the driving force of the show’s plot – one aspect of that narrative is Rhiannon’s son being snatched from his bed by a clawed hand. How did the team approach telling darker stories to younger audiences?
“The way we frame the show is as a group of people who come together to tell a story, so they know that they’re actors onstage,” Williams says. “I think that makes the moments of darkness – where it gets a bit scary – a bit safer for them, because they know it’s just a story.
“When working with children, my feeling is always not to overly sanitise stuff. I think children can take a lot more than we think. Always ensuring that you’re not becoming gratuitous with violence and that what you’re telling is being told sensitively – but I think we should also allow them to really enjoy those darker moments. They’re in there because they’re great parts of the story and they show the light and shade of life. Children can really understand that.’
When it came to creating the show, Williams had a clear vision, but very much relied on her actors’ devising skills to make the show a reality. “We didn’t script anything,” Williams says. “I had some key images I wanted to have – we had to see the giant, Bendigeudfran; we had to see Rhiannon on her white horse. I was a process of creating these big images and then working out how we get from those to a full-length show.
“It’s been cast-led,” she continues. “I’ll come in and say something like, ‘I think we need a moment of storytelling here to make the story clearer’ – but it’s very much improvised. The actors have the flexibility to swap between Welsh and English and to genuinely respond to the audience – if someone says something, or gives a suggestion as kids often do, the cast can actually incorporate that into the show. Which is really nice.”
Y Mabinogi is being performed in castles and other historic sites across Wales. “They’re incredibly significant sites that have a lot to say for our sense of Welshness and our sense of Welsh history,” Williams says. “These stories are their stories, their mythology. It’s really important to go to these places to perform, and hopefully it gives the kids who are watching a real sense of ‘this landscape is magical, and it’s yours’.”
Y Mabinogi runs at castles across Wales until Fri 7 Oct. Info: here
words HARI BERROW photos KIRSTEN McTERNAN