Interesting revival
Just back from The Corn is Green at the Lyttleton Theatre, Emlyn Williams’ 1938 semi-autobiographical play, staring Nicola Walker as the English school teacher L C Moffat who redeems and tutors a semi-literate (and Welsh speaking) boy destined for the mines.
This is a well praised production which turns the play into a rehearsed memory of the (now grown) schoolboy protagonist as he recalls and writes about his early life. The first act is on bare boards, with props, and is Brechtian in its staging – the second as we warm from memory to ‘real’ life in a well designed stage set of the house which formed the early school Miss Moffat founded.
Throughout the play a Welsh Male Voice Choir acts as a ‘chorus’. The early productions were naturalistic, this certainly wasn’t, with two protagonists (the ‘child’ - Iwan Davies as ‘Morgan Evans’ and the ‘grown man’ - Gareth David-Lloyd playing ‘Emlyn Williams’) acting together, the grown man as the author ‘directing’ and describing the action, and at times mouthing along with his idealised young self.
The fourth wall is at times not just breached but shattered. [There are actually no child actors, all the ‘children’ being acted by grown men and women]. The staging is, well, stagy, but really works – and the different styles in the first and second acts do not jar, perhaps because the quality of the acting is so strong. There could have been false notes with such liberties being taken, but there weren’t.
This is a good example of updating the production of a play without losing its underlying intent, indeed emphasising it. I think Emlyn Williams himself, who played Morgan Evans in the first production (there was no authorial ‘Emlyn Williams’ in that) would have approved. Certainly worth going.
[There is, I think, a nod to the 1945 film starring Bette Davies as Miss Moffatt with film arc lights on set illuminating part of one scene].