Set in a block of high-rise flats,
With the ever-present Poet, just visible through the lift-shaft, writing the action as it happens (and rewriting it when the characters start to take control), the story of Ella, her lover Enzo and his murder by her brother Wolfskin unfolds, creating uneasy stifled giggles from an audience initially uncomfortable with laughing at the severity of the crime, and the insanity of and perversity of a grieving girl pluckily digging up her beloved.
It takes its inspiration from a tale first told by Boccaccio and later by Keats in his poem Isabella And The Pot Of Basil in which an overprotective man deems that his sister’s lover is not good enough for her, and murders him.
In Gough’s version, the action is played out as the poet himself sits alongside writing it. As the play progresses the poet becomes more and more involved with the characters – his interaction with them is a simple yet very clever device for introducing and exploring several key themes.
Ella (Charlotte Lowri) is the suppressed sister whose dissatisfaction with the fate mapped out for her by the writer and subsequent attempts to change it reflect not only whether we are able to alter our own destiny but also the oppression of women by men. As the feisty character stands up to both her domineering brother (Oli Morys) and the poet (Jacob Lly^r) she proves that it is indeed possible to take control of your life.
The play also explores death and grief, with the way Ella reacts to the death of her lover, Enzo (Lly^r Edwards), testing our own preconceived notions of what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour.
At only an hour long, Gryfhead touches on several other topical issues; some, like genetic engineering, weave their way in more subtly than others and one would need to watch the play a good few times to fully appreciate just how clever it is.
A modern looking set – mostly made from scaffolding – and modern props and direction (also from Gough) are juxtaposed with traditional costumes and ways of living, showing a clever fusion of past, present and future. All four cast members give strong performances and particular mention should go to Morys who also wrote the beautiful music featured in the show.
With a career spanning more than 20 years, several awards under her belt and commissions for TV, radio and theatre companies,
Gryf Head, written and directed by
In the ‘piss-stinking,’ frequently malfunctioning lift of a dilapidated council estate tower block, a nameless teenage Poet, played by Jacob Llyr, meets the scary thug (Oli Mays) who lives a floor below his; the thug’s self-assured sister (Charlotte Lowri) ; and her guitar-playing dreamer of a boyfriend (Llyr Edwards). From these brief encounters, and the skeleton plot of a fable from Bocaccio’s Decameron, the Poet spins an engrossing new-old tale. Suspended between Boccaccio’s medieval world and the Poet’s own experience, dream-visions abound; feudal barons travel past the tower (block) looking for virgin brides; and true lovers are reunited from beyond the grave, by the magic of mobile-phone technology. Suspenseful throughout, the story really picks up steam when the heroine breaks the ultimate taboo: she tries to change the Poet’s story from inside. A few lines seemed a bit didactic and superfluous. For example, the heroine demands “A new logic, where imagination runs free, snapping at the heels of characters.” That last phrase is beautiful, but the character has already communicated the rest in her act of challenging her brother and the Poet. “At the heart of every story lies a truth” is also effectively shown, and therefore does not need to be declaimed. Nevertheless, the play was enjoyable from start to end.
The most pressing of GryfHead’s interlocking stories is the characters’ struggles for control of imagination and fate, their own and each other’s. The heroine’s brother, Wolfskin, thinks imagination is dangerous. “That’s because he hasn’t got one,” Lowri observes. She speaks accurately. When asked to describe a beautiful woman, Rapunzel, whom he claims to have seen, he can only stammer that she looks “Like a girl hair, legs that sort of thing.” No wonder he also locks his sister in the flat to keep her away, he says, from “nature.”
Gough takes great risks in her writing and direction. I won’t explain how the titular severed head ends up in a large plastic bag in the lift, but there is both tension and humour in the moment when Llyr offers to help Lowri carry her “shopping.” Moments later, the head is being tossed round the kitchen. There are good reasons for this. Gough’s writing makes too much narrative and thematic sense to look like shock art. Gough’s urban wilderness eschews the clichés that have become attached to the setting in some recent plays, more detailed, visceral, primordial, and three-dimensional. It is far more Clockwork Orange than Beautiful Thing.
All the cast members acted well. Lowri’s convincingly reaches all kinds of extremes: steeliness and petulance; passion and icy wit; a pop princess’s flaky wilfulness with medieval innamorata’s lyricism. Edwards’s physical acting is mesmerising. Under Gough’s direction, he developed a bizarre style of ghost-walking that looked ghostly. As Wolfskin, leader of the Wolfpackers, Mays speaks softly and slowly but with chilling, blunt viciousness. He underplays the villain’s role effectively. Finally, Llyr communicates equally persuasively the Poet’s powerlessness in his ‘real world’ and his megalomaniacal sovereignty in the waking dreamworld of his poetry.
Duncan Gough’s multi-storey set illustrated Gough’s metaphor of tower block as the
GryfHead was a great and magical performance. I look forward to seeing Gough’s Crossing the Bar at the Arts Centre later this winter.
It was said of Eleanor Rigby that Paul McCartney had written a novel in three minutes. If you ever wondered what this meant then Lucy Gough's fifteen minute Wolfskin at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in the Restless Gravity Festival, would have enlightened you. A young man, Boy, bound to hunting with the wolf pack is having his body tattooed with a fur effect by a young pregnant woman, Girl, because she has taken his wolfskin to the launderette: "I couldn't stand the smell. All that piss and those fleas" and it's shrunk so much that he can't wear it! She is hurrying as time is running out and sometimes the needle hurts. It's a metaphor. The fifteen minute moment is very touching: it's about touching - she touches him with her needle to save him; he touches her belly wishing he could help. We have a poetic compacting of their lives. Is he a sheep in wolf's clothing? Isn't that a moving observation that strikes at the heart of male expectation of young men in a world of crazy, often inverted standards while the young women try to hang onto reality and, anyway, are bound to HELP? Is success measured by the efficiency and effectiveness of wearing the wolf's skin? The acting of Charlotte Lowri and Ben Thompson - two new young actors - was beautifully felt expressing the poignance and humour of the piece well. And the directing by the writer was perfectly paced.
Review of Lucy Gough's Mapping The Soul produced by Castaway Communty Theatre at The Studio, Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Lucy Gough's themes are the soul versus the intellect; knowledge versus imagination; the nature of death - and more importantly that place between life and death Gough calls Dread. All these meet in a dynamic, amazingly full one hour of pure theatre. Her theatre touches on all theatre. There is something Attic about her preoccupations and so, appropriately, the play opens with a Chorus which, essentially, keeps us in touch with the philosophy of the piece in a marvellously engaging way. The Chorus is not just wise but often humorous and musical. The actresses of the Chorus - Claire N Jones, Wendy Owen, Sue Jenkins and Norma Izon, perform fantastically well, moving among the audience and keeping the pulse of the piece throbbing. Lucy Gough's writing is magical. It takes us into places we rarely think about overwhelmed as we are by the ultimately unmysterious, banal world of TV drama. Which is a strange thing because Gough writes on one of the most popular soaps Hollyoaks. But I find no conflict in this. It merely confirms for me the impressiveness of her talent. And there's something sweet about the idea that this writer, while producing work that is the curse of theatre is so much more in touch with theatre than many of Britain's better known playwrights. Within the hour we make contact not only with Attic Greek theatre but with Shakespeare and Yoric's skull (two fantastic gravediggers in Andre Burnham and Richard Wagland), the mystery plays, pantomime (the hilarious antics of Lindsay Blumfield and Chris Baglin) and, for me, such modern masters as Bond. I've always thought that Lucy Gough's writing is like Bond's not so much, perhaps, in her themes as in the execution of them. The play concerns Adam and Eve (played with an engaging laid-backness by Nigel Petts and Elly Brown) who are essentially looking for the meaning of life. Adam wonders whether he'll find it in the dictionary perhaps in a word like Genome. Does the meaning of life reside in the discoveries of science and the mapping of the Genome or does it lie in the soul? If so, where is the soul? Where can you find it? A splendidly manic Justin Lyons - a Frankenstein figure of an anatomist, and his assistant Jim Finnis who delivers one of the best moments with a crazed outburst towards the end search for it in the head of a dead poet. But in the end you may map the Genome but you can't map the soul. In fact, the whole Genome project is a con, because what makes us human is our imagination and our creativity; what makes us different. These reside in mystery. It's in not knowing that we find ourselves. It's astonishing that there's so much going on and so many areas of experience visited and at the same time there is a clarity burning through the mists of mystery. This is achieved by the strong focal thread of Adam's journey; his world is invaded by the other worlds. The writing isn't only robust and clear headed but is peppered with marvellous moments of wit and humour. All the cast are extremely good: the Poet, Rhys Kelly, the Soul Tim Jackson, Stuart Jones as God and Skullcoat, Ian Gledhill as Death, Douglas Gunasinghe as the Hung Man. And in an astonishing moment of peace and stillness that suggested a moment of soulful epiphany, Virginie Mazauer as Beauty presenting the mirror to the man - Everyman - Adam. I want to mention everyone because these are all amateurs (which makes you wonder what our drama schools are doing, often sending out students who have UNlearned the art of acting!) and need to be applauded. So there were the Wolfpackers Ian Nicoll. Karl Hatton and, for some, the star of the show Jacob Llyr and the beautifully sensual Sirens Sara Hedges, Caroline Dalziel-Riddell and Kathleen Brancaccio. And finally the Sineaters Heather Giles, Danielle Marsden and Rebecca Morice. What's really satisfying about the piece is that the play itself reflects the creativity in the acting and the mystery is, I suppose, how did they do it. Well, David Blumfield's directing is highly accomplished. He manages to choreograph in a myriad of scenes with often manic entrances and exits a cast of twenty seven in a small space with hardly a glitch. Of course there are uncertain moments but this was the last night of a three night run. This show and its cast and the back-stagers Neil Rose, Maria Betteridge and Designer Rick Gough deserve a run of at least a month so that they may be adequately rewarded for their effort.
(Extract) Lucy Gough's dreams are of another time and place. "This is not a naturalistic play," she warns in the introduction to Our Lady of Shadows. In fact, Lucy Gough's world is as refreshingly distant from naturalism as one could imagine. Two of the plays - Our Lady and Head - were first commissioned as radio dramas, and they share a love of intimate sound. Head, a clever reworking of Keats's Isabella, includes some mordant asides. When Isabella's lover Enzo returns to life as a talking head, he ends up in the kitchen fridge. Thus the wonderful director's note: "The fridge has started to make chattering noises." In its final scene, Crossing the Bar achieves a powerful epiphany. It would be unfair to give the game away, but one can merely say that in death the characters find a reason for life. Gough's attention to sound is also evident here. Act Two is prefaced by strict instructions on the "soundscape" which has to be achieved: "It starts as a surreal sound which could be many things: the sea, prison sounds...," she writes. Lucy Gough has created a visual and aural world that is recognisably her own.