One of the main themes in the work of John Gwilym Jones is how man is a slave to his chromosomes at the mercy of heredity and his environment. This article focuses on the said theme in his well-known play, Ac Eto Nid Myfi. In order to consider how John Gwilym Jones the author, as opposed to John Gwilym Jones the playwright alone, made use of this theme, due attention is given to a selection of his short stories. The article also discusses the influence of Darwin’s ideas of heredity on Realism as well as on John Gwilym Jones himself.
‘’Does dim gwadu ar Etifeddiaeth’: A study of how John Gwilym Jones discusses legacy in Ac Eto Nid Myfi and a ...
Ideology and aesthetics in the drama movement
This paper examines the background and underlying assumptions involved in a public debate between Dr Kate Roberts and Dr Thomas Parry which was conducted in the columns of the Genedl newspaper in the early nineteen thirties. The subject of the debate was the policy governing the selection of plays for the annual performance of the Bangor students’ Welsh Drama Society. Since its ground breaking production of Ifor Wiliams’s translation of A Dolls House in 1926 the annual Bangor drama production had come to be seen as an event of considerable importance in the programme of the Drama Movement in Wales. However, the author of the article suggests that analysis of the aesthetic and cultural assumptions of the two authors – themselves figures of central importance at the time – raises issues of wider importance than the Drama movement itself, which continue to affect academic and cultural debate today.
From social drama to the pageant: theatre in the cultural exchange between Wales and north-east India
This article uses theatre as a lens in order to examine the cultural exchange between Wales and the Khasi and Jaiñtia Hills that is rooted in the history of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Overseas Mission present in north-east India between 1841 and 1969. Focusing on Khasi plays from the colonial period as well as an example of Welsh missionary performance staged in Wales in 1929, the article considers the extent to which Welsh conceptions of theatre and drama influenced native performances in the Khasi Hills, and correspondingly, to what extent the missionaries’ perception of India influenced the idea and the representation of the country in Welsh performative portrayals.
Wales, nationality and national theatre: Following suit or breaking new ground?
This article is a study of the relationship between nationality and national theatre in Wales from the nineteenth century up to the present day. Welsh nationality is considered in the context of contemporary discussion by the pioneering critics Umut Özkirimli and Hans Kohn on concepts of the nation. The article aims to look into the crucial questions which arise from the historical and current relationships between national theatre, as an arts exercise, and a political expression of national identity in Wales. The significance of national theatre as a tool for expressing national identity is assessed and it is questioned whether the new national theatres of the twenty first century refer back to traditional concepts of the nation and nationality or do they instead exercise a new kind of modern nationality which is defined as ‘an interaction of cultural coalescence and specific political intervention’?
Ancient gentry and the modern nation: Gwaed yr Uchelwyr read in the light of anglophone Welsh fiction of the C...
The core argument of the essay is that it would be worth setting Saunders Lewis’ important early play, Gwaed yr Uchelwyr, in the context of several anglophone Welsh novels published at the turn of the nineteenth century that sought to assess the relevance of the culture of the indigenous gentry of Wales to the new nation celebrated by the Cymru Fydd movement. It is argued that familiarity with these texts could assist us to grasp the subtlety and rich ambivalence of the play’s ideological stance.
(Performing citizenship: Sisters, a joint production between National Theatre Wales and Junoon Theatre Mumbai)
This article seeks to interrogate the ways in which the citizens of Wales use the theatrical resources at their disposal to investigate and articulate their national identities and experiences. The discussion will take a recent co-production, entitled Sisters, between National Theatre Wales and Junoon Theatre Mumbai as its starting point. Sisters stimulates discussion of new ways of creating and participating in theatre that respond creatively to the challenges of a twenty-first century global, digital and post-consumerist society. In discussion, this article will use Johannes Birringer’s uncompromising vision of theatre as a transformative activity that focuses on patterns of collaboration between unfamiliar and unrooted individuals, as a measuring yard for the success and significance of Sisters. I will also argue that the social conditions that inspired Birringer’s vision also give fresh importance to Amelia Jones’s argument about the value of responding to a production or performance by means of secondary evidence, or ‘detritus’, as described by Mathew Reason.
Woyzeck Büchner, Peter Szondi and the crisis of drama
In this article Myfanwy Miles Jones analyses Büchner’s portrayal of the central character’s developing psychosis in the light of R. D. Laing’s existential psychiatric theory. Observing the progressive nature of Büchner’s dramatisation of the depth and coplexity of the human mind in turn reveals the formal limitations of drama in the Nineteenth Century. Setting Woyczeck in the context of Szondi’s formal analysis of modern drama, the article argues that Büchner’s treatment of madness casts new light on the formal development of modernist drama and argues that the fact that the play is unfinished is an inevitable consequence of the project itself, given that the formal resolution of the dramatic situation required the existence of conditions which had not at that time come into being.
Penwythnos Cyfarwyddo Theatr 2013 a 2014
Cyfweliadau gyda chyfarwyddwyr theatr blaenllaw a ffilmiwyd yn ystod Penwythnos Cyfarwyddo Theatr 2013 a 2014. Dyma brosiect cydweithredol a drefnir gan Brifysgol De Cymru.