MAN TO MAN -WMC LAST DAY TODAY!

Wales Millennium Centre presents a new version of  Man to Man. Today is the last day. IT's not an easy piece to engage with but it's a definite MUST SEE. It is the first full in-house production under the new artistic direction of Graeme Farrow. Translated and adapted by Alexandra Wood from Manfred Karge’s masterpiece ‘Jacke wie Hose’, the production  ' reimagines the one woman show as a visceral and virtuosic piece of physical theatre.'
       After her husband dies, Ella Gericke adopts his identity and continues working his job as a crane operator in order to survive in Nazi Germany. Compromising her own identity for survival, Ella is plunged into a new masculine world of beer, schnapps and poker; a claustrophobic lonely existence dominated by the fear of discovery and the changing face of authority in a volatile twentieth century Germany. In the opening speech, Ella, in the guise of her husband Max, shouts out of her window at the layabout youths on the street corners, “Work will set you free”, and the mantra from the gates of Auschwitz hangs over the entire production until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
    Margaret Ann Bain playing Ella switches from husband to wife and back again with alacrity and virtuosity, changing her accent from the hard consonants of a male Scotland to the softer tones of a female England. Sometimes the switches are so quick-fired that I found myself dizzy trying to keep up. To play yourself and your alter ego and remember your lines for 70 minutes is an amazing feat. 
      The design of set, lighting, video, sound and effects brought together by a team including Richard Kent, Andrzej Goulding, Rick Fisher and others is extraordinary for its ingenuity, atmosphere, mood, and adding layers of suggestion and meaning to this one woman show.

WMC   Weston Studio. Tonight 27 March 2015 at 8pm- box office 029 2063 6464   web site: www.wmc.org.uk

DAFYDD DEFIES MRS JENKINS

Last night was 'Script Cafe' at the Arts Centre in Pontadawe, a village nestling in the Black Mountain, between Swansea and Ystradgynlais. Giving so much geographical detail  is relevant because it's near to one of the notorious schools that Rhys worked in when he first graduated as a young art teacher. It's one of the settings used for 'The Unmade Bed,' a play I've adapted from a short story I wrote based on his experiences in the mid 1960s.  Last month and last night the play got a short reading. Dafydd, the Rhys character, has trouble at school with the headmaster, the children, in his love life and with Mrs Jenkins, his landlady. Last night Rhys, who reads the part of Dafydd had to pee into a milk bottle on stage and hide it in Mrs J's wardrobe.
 I must say his acting skills are coming on a treat. But, after listening to Kit Lambert talk about adapting Gullivers Travels for Hijinx Theatre, I'm going to have to take a razor to the narration. Sorry Rhys!

IN ANTICIPATION OF HOUSE SIT MEXICO

It's three weeks before we go and over a month since I signed up to www.Mindmyhouse.com after a cursory reading of a Guardian article on house sitting in Costa Rica. Around the house I've had post- its reading, 'What's the big idea for 2010?' This seemed to fit the bill, that is before I saw a consultant about my arthritic hip. After suggesting he compare mine with Rhys' pre-op, he said,
'On a scale from mild to severe, I would say...'
He must have seen me dragging my leg up the corridor, like Chester in the 60's cowboy series 'Matt Dillon', except I hadn't been shot or had polio. I was born with a dislocated hip and in those days there weren't regular checks so at the age of nearly eighteen months an aunt noticed my Chester impersonation and brought it to the attention of my mother, who must have had other important things on her mind. Most children at that age would have been able to stand and walk. I just crawled dragging one leg behind the other. I was hospitalised at St Ormond's Children's Hospital and scolded by the ward nurse for crying when I saw my parents on the other side of the port- hole window abandoning me to her mercies. (The NHS had no child/ parent friendly policies then.) I believe it accounts for my anxious separation attachment style.
My legs were pulled apart under anasthetic into plastered splints. Once removed I was subjected for several years to my father's nightly physiotherapy while we listened to 'The Archers on BBC Radio. With scrunched up toes on my left foot I picked up hundreds of marbles one by one out of an old Dundee fruit cake tin and placed them carefully in another. Then reversed the procedure until the programme had finished.
It worked. By the age of seven I was given the all clear, but taken round the Children's Ward to see limping children in brown leather and steel calipers and reminded of how lucky I was that Aunt Queenie had noticed me in time.
'...it's severe,' Mr Jones proclaimed. 'But I must say Great Ormond Street did a great job for the time. It's amazing it's lasted this long. I think you should have a hip replacement very soon, before it collapses and gives you and me big trouble.'
I didn't like to tell him I'd already signed up for the whole of April to mind Larry's houseplants in San Miguel Allende, Mexico.
When I told my daughter she immediately took on the personality of Saffie in 'Absolutely Fabulous '
'What do you know about this...Larry'?
'Why does he want someone to come from Wales to look after his houseplants in Mexico?'
'Why can't he get someome local to do it?'
'Could house plants be a code for something else?'
'Where is San Miguel?' What is the place like?'
I couldn't answer any of these questions and hadn't even thought of asking.
'Mother!'
This was to be the big idea for 2010. That was before my hip replacement operation, provisional date 18 May. Leave for Mexico via Houston March 30. Holy Week and according to the Rough Guide, the time when the whole of Mexico is on the move. Return May 3. Lots of time for Mexican adventures looking after a retired nurse's 'house plants.'
In Mexico, it seems, you are guilty before proved innocent.