Reviews

Angel by Chris Cooper

Western Mail on Friday 23 March 2007 by David Adams 

NEVER let anyone tell you that community theatre is simplistic – even when its target audience is, as it is with most Theatr Powys shows, anyone over the age of six. 

Angel, the Llandrindod-based company’s latest touring show, is chock-a-block full of ideas, images and emotions almost to bursting point – and yet, when I caught up with it at Ystradgynlais, the primary school-age kids were totally engaged with a very complex piece of theatre. 

At one level this is the story of a young boy in the ‘50s growing up the hard way – losing his soldier father, standing up to his insensitive headmaster, falling in love (sort of) with the girl next door, all the while being best friends with an “angel” – a      from another place – to the sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. 

But Chris Cooper’s new play is about much more.  It’s a memorial to the Suez adventure of 1956 and just as John Osborne’s The Entertainer, just making a timely return to the West End, is also about the same turning-point in British history but uses music hall as an allegory of a dying age, Cooper’s intelligent, whimsical and urgent parable is set in a South Wales Valley home and schoolyard. 

There’s a surreal quality to the production that really works well – although perhaps the play itself is just too full of significance. 

The absent father’s shirt on the washing line accidentally gets stained by a strawberry and we know he will be shot, for example.   With the constant reference to time ticking away, Hywel’s football flies into the head’s study and smashes his clock.   His teacher, discovering his fascination for angels, gives him Milton’s Paradise Lost illustrated by Dore. 

The levels of meaning, though, never weigh the storytelling down, thanks not just to an imaginative and lyrical production but to an impressive central performance from Iwan Charles with good support from Naomi Doyle as Deryn, Hywel’s girlfriend. 

And for all its despair and anger, the play does end on a note of hope.   When Mam leaves the family house, the new residents, who come from somewhere like Suez, move in.   And while the mother doesn’t like bubble-gum and can only offer tea rather than pop, she and Deryn look like they’ll get on: the door is open, she says, and in a play where doors and gates are forever being shut, that’s how it ends – with the ghost of Hywel, an angel himself now looking at us with something like hope in his eyes.