The Metropolis

In-depth interview: Steffan Donnelly tells us about performing a Welsh play, in Welsh, on the London stage

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 31 January, 2013 11:07

What: A play, Saer Doliau (Doll Mender), performed in Welsh with English surtitles
When: 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18 and 19 February
Where: Finborough Theatre, SW10 9ED, nr Earls Ct / West Brompton
How much: £14, £10 concessions

Steffan Donnelly (above, right, with the rest of the cast) is about to act in a play performed in Welsh, with English surtitles, at the Finborough Theatre. We asked him about the play, the language, and why people who don’t speak Welsh should go along to watch Saer Doliau.

Snipe: Can you tell us a little about the substance of the play, what it’s about and what themes you think resonate with us now?

Steffan: Saer Doliau is an existentialist play written in 1966 by Wales’ most prolific playwright Gwenlyn Parry. With its surreal overtones, Pinteresque use of language, and mysterious characters it represents an important turning point in Welsh theatre, as it brought modernism to our stage.

It’s about an old Doll Mender, Evans, who goes about his business mending dolls in his workshop until a woman (called The Girl) strolls in unannounced. Without reference to Evans, she takes control of running the workshop, and appoints a new apprentice, The Lad (the part I am playing). Both of them play mind games to unsettle Evans and uproot his settled way of doing things. The finale of the play can be read on a number of different levels – a straightforward clash between old and new, the inevitability of modernisation, the lack of respect of the young for their elders and traditional ways, the incomprehensibility of existence, the rationality of belief in a higher being, and so on.

Throughout the play Evans has a relationship with the mysterious “Gaffer” – Evans believes that on the other end of the telephone is someone who will advise him and to whom he can complain. Perhaps one of the most poignant episodes in the play is when the Lad, somewhat unfeelingly, explains to Evans that there’s no telephone line into the workshop, so the phone can’t possibly be working. This forces him to ask himself whether he exists in a vacuum and has been imploring a non-existent higher power to help him.

The play also examines our obsession with modernisation, the role of women and the power women hold within our society, and asks searching questions about our existence (and beliefs).

Not many people in London (myself included) will be aware of the work of Welsh language playwrights. Can you put Gwenlyn Parry in context and help people understand why he is important and why Saer Doliau is worth reviving?

Sitting in class at the school I went to on Anglesey, we were told to watch a grainy video of a play we’d never heard of written by some old guy. It was Saer Doliau, and it was remarkable, like nothing we’d seen before. It was the first Welsh play my friends and I had seen, and we became obsessed with its themes, the questions it was provoking us to think about, the weirdness of the very moving story, and the ambiguous characters – to the point where we wrote and performed a response piece to it the following week!

Ask anyone who remembers the first production in the 60’s, or read the reviews of it, and you will find exactly the same response. It’s an enduring, timeless play. It’s a story which consumes you.

The play’s theatricality has been something we’ve explored in depth during rehearsals – Gwenlyn discovered a perfect marriage between his own visual way of looking at the world, his astute ear for language/dialect and his restless, questioning nature.

Gwenlyn’s work has influenced many creative people in Wales today. He showed bravery, going against the norm, he didn’t just give people what they expected on visits to the theatre. That’s something I really admire about him. All too quickly things can become staid and boring, people “make it” and replicate what they did to get there instead of keeping on reinventing, rediscovering, and being brave about what and why they’re doing it.

We spoke to Mathew Rhys (the Welsh actor) last week about this and he agreed with us, saying that “this incredible play, as did this incredible playwright, had an enormous influence on me. It’s an amazing piece”.

This is a play staged in London, performed in Welsh with English subtitles. Was that hard to get off the ground?

Surprisingly not. Invertigo [Steffan’s theatre company] represent the lesser-known, and two of us founding members are Welsh (Siôn from Cardiff, and myself from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgoerychwyrndrobwllsantysiliogogogoch), and we both love Gwenlyn’s work and ideas – so it had to happen.

Initially we were going to do it site-specific in an actual timberyard in Walthamstow. In hindsight, thank God we didn’t, because I don’t think we’d have sold a single ticket for that!

I’d been talking with Neil McPherson (Artistic Director of the Finborough) about getting one of Invertigo’s Summer productions into the Finborough, and he felt that Saer Doliau would complement another play programmed in their season, a Scottish play in Gaelic (Somersaults by Iain Finlay Macleod, dir. Russell Bolam) about the destruction of the language.

Launching Saer Doliau in London (which is a premiere for the play in England) has some sentimental value too, because it was this theatrical city that was such an inspiration to Gwenlyn when he was a budding playwright (and full-time Maths teacher) spending his spare time seeing West End shows and getting involved with the London Welsh Drama Company.

It’s a big risk for us to take, the lively London-Welsh community is not quite big enough to carry this on its own, so we’re testing Londoners’ theatrical appetite here!

In fact, the appetite might already be here. UK culture has been very US-centric for the last 20 years, but perhaps we are now discovering a willingness to look farther afield (the success of BBC4 bought-in programmes like Borgen, The Killing, Montalbano, and the Globe’s Theatre of the World initiative last summer). Invertigo believes there is a whole world of untapped resources in Europe that have never really been mined, and this is one of our key aims. For example, we’ve just commissioned a translation of a Czech play which I’m going to adapt.

With devolution, there has been a greater interest about affairs in Wales and Scotland, and a corresponding confidence on the part of creative artists from those two countries. So there is fertile ground for trying to widen exposure to native-language traditions.

We’re confident that watching the play in Welsh with English surtitles will be a rewarding experience for the audience (using the surtitles as a crutch) – they will not only get to hear a Celtic language which is just three hours train journey away from them, but they will see a subtly different way of looking at things compared to the one they are used to.

A lot of people think of the Welsh as being very musical and beautiful speakers, but they’re often thinking of English spoken with a Welsh accent. They may never have heard Welsh spoken at length and uninterrupted. How much will experiencing the Welsh language be part of the effect of your performance, in addition to the dramatic effect of the play?

I was once told by a friend hearing me speak Welsh on the phone that I sounded like a camel having difficulty chewing. Thankfully, that particular response to my speaking Welsh is a rare one.

Camels aside, there is a flow to the colloquial Welsh used in this play which has captured the natural rhythms of Welsh-speakers, so it’s a very accurate picture of how Welsh sounds in day-to-day life. I’m biased, but I do really think that it’s a beautiful language which has huge expressive capacity. The accent you hear in English-speaking Welsh people matches the language’s unique musicality.

The other co-founders who have been in to see a run of the play have found it an unusual but captivating experience, saying that you can understand what’s going on and what people are doing to each other and that you almost con yourself into believing that you understand the language being spoken. I think this is testament to spoken Welsh’s ebb and flow and expressive capabilities, as well as the direction of the production, which has been focussed on pinpointing and visually accentuating relationships and key events in the text.

Welsh also has so many brilliant, often funny idioms and that was a challenge when I was translating this play for the surtitling. The translating process opened my eyes to how accurate Gwenlyn’s portrayal of Welsh-speakers are, and how his genius lies allowing dark humour and quirky colloquialisms to portray our way of speaking.

Can you talk about where Welsh language is at the moment? Do you hear Welsh being spoken when you turn your ear towards the far future? Or will performances like this one serve rather as a commemoration for something that cannot be expected to survive all the forces which seem to be against it?

I’m worried about the future of our language – the latest census showed another small drop in the number of speakers. Growing up, it was seen as the “uncool” language to speak and I assume that vibe still exists now.

I suppose I’m part of the problem because, like many Welsh people in the creative field particularly, I’ve moved to London to further my career.

I hope with every fibre of my being that this production of Saer Doliau won’t be a commemoration for ‘Rest in Peace Welsh’. Instead, I think it’s a small step forward for promoting Welsh as a European language which is useful and worthwhile to the rest of the world. It’s about promoting our heritage, culture, and creative work on the London stage.

I do find it frustrating when Welsh-speakers and political/linguistic organisations aggressively focus in on how to develop Welsh within Wales. We need rather to gather momentum behind the language, to pique people’s curiosity, to make it a “cool” thing.

My neighbour thought Welsh was an accent until two days ago, and of course – how can people know any different if we keep everything inside the borders of Wales? There’s some incredible Welsh-language work being made (TV, theatre, writing) but it won’t be seen by anyone outside of Wales. That sort of approach is not going to expand people’s knowledge of what we have to offer.

As with any minority nation, it’s imperative to look at globalisation as a two-way street. It isn’t just about economics and trade, it’s about culture, and it’s important to emphasise that cultural globalisation should not be one-way (an unhealthy monoculture), eg English being used for everything, or Western values supplanting indigenous ones. It should be a two-way process (a healthy ecology of multiple species). There should be more support and encouragement of work which is diverse and rooted in celebrating what we have and have sustained.

As a Welsh actor, does it feel different to be able to perform in Welsh? Or is this just another role?

Maybe I’ve been able to access a more honest part of myself, because I’m expressing my thoughts and moving the story along using my mother tongue.

The director, Aled Pedrick, comes from West Wales and there have been moments where he’s given me a note and he’s used a word from West Wales that I have no idea what it means! Every day I’m extending my West Walian vocabulary!

One thing I have to say is how much I have enjoyed being able to speak Welsh in London for such a sustained period of time! Being able to joke, argue, and discuss in it has been refreshing.

Finally…is bringing a Welsh language play to London an anti-imperialist act? I’m thinking of RS Thomas – the Welsh poet who wrote in English because he was denied the chance to learn Welsh: “England, what have you done to make the speech / my fathers used a stranger at my lips…” Do you feel a thrill of irony at the thought of English speakers in a theatre in London listening to a language they cannot understand? How much anger is there still in Wales at what English did to Welsh? Or is that the attitude of an older generation?

There is a thrill but for us it’s not an ironic or politically motivated one. Rather, it’s a thrill of discovery, of engaging with the unusual, the chance to experience something you might have a little knowledge of, afresh. In that sense it is a post-imperialist act, proving that all languages are equal in value, if not in status.

I think that developing a common cultural heritage is crucial for a healthy and thriving cultural landscape. We need to identify, applaud, and develop the diversity within our tiny island.

I am very aware of the history of aggression against Welsh people and the language, and sometimes I feel annoyed at those in England who are ignorant of that part of British history and the social changes which were forced upon the Welsh. There are astonishing examples like the Welsh Not (where speaking Welsh at school was punished with the cane in order to enforce English as the only language of education), and more recently the drowning of Tryweryn in the 1960s (where a Welsh village was flooded to provide a reservoir that would supply water for Liverpool).

The more we can identify with our heritage as Welsh people, no matter what our language, the better the chances of survival for Welsh. In a famous poem by TH Parry-Williams (Bro – which means the locality you belong to), he talks about how the very landscape will change to reflect his death, and ends:

Nid creu balchderau mo hyn gan un-o’i‘go –
Mae darnau ohonof ar wasgar hyd y fro.
These are not the fantasies of someone who has lost his mind –
There are pieces of me scattered across this land.

He is saying that people are not only transient figures in the landscape, they actually create that landscape in their daily lives. That is as true now as ever it was – it is up to the Welsh to continue generating the landscape (mental as well as physical) that they want their children to live in. Regarding Welsh itself, I think the renowned singer Dafydd Iwan said it best:

Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
R’yn ni yma o hyd.
In spite of everyone and everything
We’re still here.

Previous in-depth interviews

Flash fiction publisher Holly Clarke explains how a 60-word story can still mean something
Helen Babbs on creating a new generation of urban nature writers
Photographer Mike Tsang on the blessing and the curse of growing up a Chinese Londoner
Kate Flowers of CoOperaCo on her mutualised operatic finishing school
Stratford filmmaker Winstan Whitter on what got lost when Dalston changed

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