A collection of five monologues by Welsh dramatists portraying five characters lacking in confidence attempting to understand their complex worlds and find their self-identity.

Casgliad o bum monolog gan ddramodwyr Cymreig yn portreadu pum cymeriad yn ymdrechu i ddeall eu bywydau cymhleth a chanfod eu hunaniaeth.

David Adams, in his postscript to this welcome volume of five one-act plays by Welsh male dramatists, puts great emphasis on the question of representation, and on the idea of personhood expressed through this compressed dramatic form. He draws particular attention to questions of masculinity and to the ways in which Wales’s own ‘postcolonial identity’ is represented through the five dramatic voices chosen. All five plays take place in South Wales, which is depicted as a particularly fraught arena for masculine identity.

Some of the plays chosen here – most notably Ian Rowlands’s Marriage of Convenience about the experience of being brought up within Welsh medium schooling in a predominantly monolingual Rhondda, and Mark Jenkins’s Playing Burton, which re-enacts the career of the stage and film actor – concern themselves with notions of gender representation and cultural identity head on. However, not all the plays in this lively edition tackle these issues as overtly, and Adams’s thoughtful pronouncements seem rather weighty for the miniaturized form of the one-act play.

Indeed, it would be difficult to place Ed Thomas’s Envy and Frank Vickery’s Sleeping with Mickey within any sustained discussion of Welsh national identity. Thomas’s comic piece presents Ystradgynlais/Cwmgiedd as the village that went mad, and this mischievous tale of a misfit who wants to bring the Mastermind contest to the local Miners Welfare Hall summons up a host of recognizable Upper Swansea Valley types. Similarly, Vickery’s sad story of a woman who has lost everything – her child, husband and a moment of sexual joy with an employee of Disneyland – is unmistakably voiced in South Walian idiom. The remaining text in the volume, Roger Williams’s Saturday Night Forever, is a brightly observed commentary on the mores, fears and cultural icons of gay culture – again, a well-voiced piece of drama but not necessarily a critical interrogation of either masculinity or Welshness.

Given this rather mixed bag of topics and concerns, there are not necessarily questions about representation raised here but rather issues of representativeness. Can these short plays be seen as representative of Welsh drama at present? Is Adams’s choice a confident cross-section of Welsh dramatic writing from the 1990s? Definitely. The wry wit, energetic language and swiftly moving action apparent in all these plays represent contemporary Welsh drama at its best, and it is no surprise to learn that plays such as Rowlands’s imaginative and sensitive analysis of a Valleys adolescence and Jenkins’s multi-stranded view of Richard Burton have been performed many more times than originally expected.

Anna-Marie Taylor

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