›› ’There was a man once who wanted to take me away. He was a fine lad. He would have done anything for me. He died because my father wanted me to die.’ She stared down at the bottom of the garden. ‘He would have lived if my father hadn’t seen him. His name was James Walter Mathias.’ ... (Continues on PAGE 3)
Sixty six year old man from the Rhondda wants to be the new James Bond ›› Read Gwyn Thomas’ letter to the producers of one of the most successful movie series of all time ... (FULL STORY ON Page 8)
The Dark Philosopher
02 LEFT GWYN Thomas
The Dark Philosophers 11-13 November 2010 National Theatre Wales in association with
Told by an Idiot In partnership with
the Riverfront – Newport The Riverfront — Kingsway Newport NP20 1HG Show Time 7:30PM Tickets £8/£12/£14 Concessions £6/£10/£12 Schools £8 Book Tickets 01633 656757 Book Online nationaltheatrewales.org newport.gov.uk/theriverfront Follow us on facebook & twitter #NTW08 THEATR IAITH SAESNEG O SAFON, A’I GWREIDDAU YNG NGHYMRU, WEDI’I GWNEUD I BAWB.
19-20 November 2010 The Stiwt — Broad Street Rhosllannerchrugog Wrexham LL141RB Show Time 7:30PM Tickets £8/£14/£12 Concessions £6/£10/£12 BOOK Tickets 01978 841300 Book OnlinE nationaltheatrewales.org stiwt.co.uk
Based on the Works of Gwyn Thomas Adapted by Carl Grose & Told By An Idiot Directed by Paul Hunter Designed by Angela Davies LIGHTING DESIGNED BY CERI JAMES Composer Iain Johnstone Cast Alex Beckett David Charles Nia Davies Ryan Hacker Daniel Hawksford Bettrys Jones Glyn Pritchard Laura Rogers
The great 1940s Valleys comic storyteller Gwyn Thomas becomes a darkly hilarious twenty-first century comedian. Taking no prisoners and respecting no laws, other than the right to survive, he is one of Wales’ most distinctive voices of the last century. National Theatre Wales in association with Told By An Idiot celebrate this Welsh great new dramatisation of his short stories.
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...Continued from Front PAge
Uncle Cadwallader went up to the Terraces to live in what they call sin with a very big woman called Agnes who had thick red hair and a fine record in sin. This Agnes had worn out about forty blokes without getting any paler herself and she cottoned on to my Uncle Cadwallader when she saw him throw a cart at a horse that had nearly run him over. She said here was a man who would see her through old age without going on the Lloyd George every whipstitch… There was something like the hot middle of the earth in the thick redness of that woman’s hair, and I could get the feel of the grip she had on Cadwallader.
‘I’ve heard of him.’ ‘He’s dead now.’ ‘Did you say Simeon killed…?’ ‘I didn’t say anything.’ ‘But shouldn’t the police… or somebody…?’ ‘What happened to James Walter Mathias is my business, my father’s and Walter’s. And where he sleeps, he’s near to me. Very near to me and that’s good.’ For two or three minutes she looked out of the window towards the bottom of the garden where she had been kneeling in the cabbage plot. Then, without another word, with her lips sticking stiffly outward, she left the room.
The Dark Philosopher
04 We lost Caradoc Shanklyn at the zoo. We split up to search for him and scoured the zoo at least half a dozen times. We were anxious, for we would not have put it past Shanklyn to try to steal some rare animal to recoup his losses on the drinks. Then someone remembered that Shanklyn had done service briefly in the Camel Corps as a way of avoiding human company in the Middle East. And it was indeed near the camel pound we found him, fast asleep. We got him awake and he told us with a smile that he had been dreaming of the quietness, the serenity and the cheapness of his days in the desert‌ He went around the pound patting each of the camels before he left.
WWI VETERAN FINDS COMFORT IN CAMELS
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Ghostly school bag terrorises pupils
I had a dream. That one day the bag would turn up at school apparently on its own, not hanging from your body as it usually did, but with you inside, mooing and frightening hell out of boys and staff alike.
The Dark Philosopher
MAN IN WHEELCHAIR SURVIVES steep hill HORSE CRASH
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The Dark Philosopher
The road was clear except for a cart, the grocery cart of the Co-operative store, drawn by Franklyn’s old horse, Dewi, now called Divi. To avoid any possibility of collision, Franklyn, always clear-minded when travelling at top speed, leaned heavily to the right. But when he was about half-way down the hill Divi started to move and with its bulk and the cart’s blocked the road.
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Franklyn who had now given up any attempt to guide the chair, was now heading straight for Divi. By an astonishing bit of crouching he passed under the horse with about an inch to spare. He shot over a bridge and up the slope on the other side of the valley.
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Dear Mr Saltzman, Dear Mr Broccoli, I hear you are looking for a new James Bond and you suggest a younger man. I think this is a mistake. You need an older man and I think I fit the bill. I am sixty-six. I am still an effective lover and a pretty handy tenor with an extraordinary ear. If ever you should get James Bond to sing, and it’s about time that he did, for a change, I’m your man.
LETTERS: I’m the new 007
I notice that you want a man who walks well. You say he should move like Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, Clarke Gable. I haven’t actually seen these men in action and have no idea what is special in the way they walked as I only went to the cinema once when I was on the rota of voluntary ushers at the welfare hall. However, I think I walk all right. I live on a hill riddled with ruts and pot-holes and have grown very agile over the years dodging these traps. This would come in useful for me when I have to fling myself flat at the approach of bullets. I think I should mention that I tend to walk in a rather low-slung sort of way. I asked Alderman Beynon if he thought this would spoil my chances as a successor to Sean Connery. He said no, like a shot! Yours sincerely Gwyn Thomas
The Dark Philosopher
The Newport Assembly A different kind of creative opportunity The Newport Assembly will happen inside The Dark Philosophers Shop (Opposite Iceland) on Saturday 13th November at 5.00pm. Free Entry. The Newport Assembly runs alongside the production for you to encounter theatre as a space for exploration, discussion and shared experience. We need YOU to make it happen! We are looking for local musicians, performers, artists, filmmakers, hairdressers, bakers, shop assistants, bus drivers, dog owners, tea drinkers, anyone who is interested, to get involved and create an event of performance and discussion about what matters to you, the people of Newport, right now.
What is the big question on Newport’s mind? Let’s find out… In the Valleys we asked, “When does the future start?” In Cardiff we asked, “Is Cardiff a young city?” In Prestatyn we asked, “What does a Welsh person sound like?” During lunchtimes between Wednesday 20th – Saturday 23rd October, we are holding Philosophers’ Cafes in the Shop. These are discussion events where we will discover the Newport Question: what matters to you right now? Come along, have a brew and a biscuit and tell us what the Newport Assembly should be about! Want to get involved? Catherine Paskell / Creative Associate assembly@nationaltheatrewales.org 029 2035 3075 / 07545 915 185
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Help shape the future of National Theatre Wales Become a National Theatre Wales TEAM Member and join others in running events, sharing your ideas, starting new projects and spreading the word… In exchange we offer you the chance to get behind the curtain, to tell us what you would like to see shown, learn new skills and receive training, take part in building the shows and we’ll even throw in a ticket. We are looking for TEAM member across Wales but especially at our 2010/2011 show locations: South Wales Valleys / Swansea Cardiff / Barmouth / North Wales Brecon Beacons / Bridgend / Newport Snowdonia / Aberystwyth / Milford Haven Port Talbot… and beyond. For more information please contact Devinda De Silva / TEAM Co-ordinator 029 2035 3079 / 07540 687021 team@nationaltheatrewales.org nationaltheatrewales.org/community You must be 16+ All expenses are paid
National Theatre Wales is set to create bold, invigorating theatre in the English language, rooted in Wales, with an international reach. This production is #08 of the launch year programme — 12 shows over 12 months, one a month, plus one spectacular finale — in amazing places and unique spaces across Wales. National Theatre Wales 30 Castle Arcade / Cardiff / CF10 1BW Phone +44 (0)29 2035 3070 info@nationaltheatrewales.org
nationaltheatrewales.org
Formed in 1993 by Hayley Carmichael, Paul Hunter and John Wright, Told by an Idiot is an award-winning company. It has established an international reputation for its comic, innovative and startlingly original productions, revelling in a style of theatre that is bigger than life. From Caracas to Coventry, the company has performed throughout the world, collaborating with celebrated artists including Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Pullman and Michel Faber.
“Told by an Idiot, a place where deep feelings lurk under comic surfaces.” Time Out “The questioning intelligence they bring to their work is admirable and uncommonly powerful.” The Times +44 (0)20 7407 4123 / info@toldbyanidiot.org
toldbyanidiot.org
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(1913–1981) BY Dai Smith / Chair – Arts Council of Wales
Gwyn Thomas was born in the Rhondda in 1913. And, as he used to say, ‘the next year was even worse’. It was a concentration of Time and Space that conspired to place him at the centre of the maelstrom that was South Wales in the last century. He once hyperbolically claimed that the Rhondda Valleys of his childhood and early manhood
The Dark Philosopher European masterpieces were often the collective narrators he called ‘we’, his Greek chorus laughing hysterically in the wings of history, his Dark Philosophers. These works, of unique style and universal significance, could have been written by no-one who had not come from that time and that place.
were ‘a more significant Chicago’. He meant that a great massing of people coming together, largely immigrant and explosive in growth, had turned their mere human aggregation into a congregation of purpose. Out of the most searing poverty and grinding unemployment, which in the 1920s and 1930s had succeeded the dynamic coal capitalism of the 1900s, they had sustained a community through their own intrinsic worth and by expressing its validity in a culture of expressiveness which had scarcely any like on earth. Gwyn became its supreme voice. From the late 1940s to the early 1950s he published a series of moral fables that took the form of short stories, novellas and full-blown novels but were, in intent, monologues of rhetoric and riffs of dialogue in which savagery was marked by comedy, increasingly black and bilious, and moral judgement was delivered with the stiletto sidestep of irony. His protagonists in these
Success, of a limited kind, brought him wider fame and eventually a loosening of the foothold of security he had found in a mis-fitting career as a school teacher of Spanish. I had encountered him this way as one of his pupils in Barry Grammar School in the 1950s and, thereafter, read him voraciously for his wisdom as much as his incomparable wit. The very fact that he was so funny, in speech and conversation no less than on the page, has sometimes obscured the full force and significance of his meaning, almost as if, for some, on tv and radio, he ended up all wind, and no Chicago. Yet this, in Gwyn’s own words in 1952, was to ‘look a gift horse in the mouth’. The plain fact is that in a Wales of one-dimensional, one-trick-pony writers, this Genius of Expressiveness had it all and displayed his outrageous facility in plays, newspaper columns, musicals, memoir and fiction, to sing his own song, personal yet collective, notwithstanding the tired conventions of form or genre. He had even dreamed of a national theatre of Wales that could embody so much of the things to which he had witnessed during his lifetime. Both The Keep in 1962 and Sap in 1974, that forerunner of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely
11 War!, are testimony to his yearning to make drama our own in Wales. He would have been delighted to see National Theatre Wales finally emerge in 2010, and thrilled to know that his Dark Philosophers would, in a new and vital manner, speak their truth and tell their lesson again for this new century. Naturally, they will tell it in such a way as to make their listeners rock with laughter and ache with the pain of their revelatory comedy. How else, Gwyn asked us, would you have it? How else could it be?
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Upper Dock Street Newport NP20 1DL 07856 270245
The Dark Philosophers
Come and visit the Dark Philosophers Pop-Up Shop in Newport and get to know more about National Theatre Wales over a cuppa. We have loads of free events, workshops and performances going on in the shop, including open rehearsals every Friday lunchtime where you can watch the hilarious Dark Philosophers show being made.
To find out what’s going on daily, check the shop ‘Window of opportunity’, give us a ring, or visit our website nationaltheatrewales.org Want to get involved? emptyshop@nationaltheatrewales.org