One Woman, One Voice

The five playwrights in their seven plays certainly create landscapes of imagination and display a wide range of emotion and experience. Some are adaptations from a Welsh original, a larger cast play or a radio program with documentary input, but all are presented here assuming a stage (or possibly filmed) context. While all are pieces of high quality writing, I cannot see them being added to many stage repertoires.Perhaps the most poetic and intriguing are Lucy Gough’s plays. The Red Room and The Tail were both from a radio series containing additional documentary material. The Red Room is here presented as a stage performance, but is very much a sound-scape, probably best in its original medium. However, it gives a powerful and persuasive evocation of Charlotte Bronte's frame of mind when writing Jane Eyre. Directions in The Tail suggest a film rather than staging. The piece explores a young girl's coming to terms with her changing body and approaching adulthood through the fantasy of being a mermaid. The combination of her emotional journey and the mermaid's imagined one works extremely well.Sharon Morgan's Magic Threads originates on stage but would probably work better on radio. Using a lot of songs (in both Welsh and English), it is a patchwork of memories, not of one character but of several generations of Welsh women - homely, pious, wanton and tragic. These are seen through a child's memories and the material of their lives sewn into her quilt. As a live performance this must have been quite a tour de force but is also very demanding for its audience.In some ways Gwenno Dafydd's No Regrets is similar but follows a much more conventional pattern of storytelling. It is a record of her highly successful one woman show as Edith Piaf: living through her extraordinary experiences and singing her songs.In Lucinda Coxon's I am Angela Brazil, Angela is to be played by a man, a double distancing announced at the play's opening. The character's speech revolves around a mysterious and humiliating dream she had, but weaves in her lover, geriatric mother, husband and his mother. Though at times rawly emotional, I felt this was a frustrating piece, lacking the haunting poetry and drama of Waiting at the Water's Edge.The two plays by Christine Watkins both originally had more characters but work well as solos. In Welcome to my World Ada assumes (or hallucinates?) Shoona, her Norwegian-speaking sister, who vanished at the age of four and has now reappeared after the death of their mad mother. The performance is structured by the songs of Jim Reeves and the tone is a strange mixture of comedy, gothic horror and domestic grief which does indeed draw one in. Queen of Hearts was a full-length with four characters. Here we see the others only through the words of Annie, an 82-year-old with some very strange friends. Annie is certainly a lively creation but the scenario is rather too deliberately bizarre.All these writers seem fascinated by the extreme and fantastic; sometimes, perhaps, at the cost of engaging their audience in a plausible story. However, certainly on radio, authors have always relished the freedom of letting the imagination run riot. On stage, it takes a very special performer to succeed in carrying the audience with them. The editor's introduction is as clear and scholarly as one would expect from Hazel Walford Davies, both on the form and this collection. The selected plays make interesting reading but I am not sure many offer scripts that will be widely used by others.