summer 2011
The Summer Course 2011 saw the students of wgytc rehearse and perform 3 very different pieces, all with one common theme: tyranny.
The process began with a 3 day research trip to Berlin. The Company then took up residence at Dan Y Coed, during which time they designed, researched, and rehearsed the work. The subject matter of the pieces this summer was a real challenge for the young people involved, requiring them to question their own pre-conceptions and understanding of the horror of the Holocaust, the complexity of the current situation in Palestine and the political climate of the 1930s and the rise of fascism.
The performance sessions at Margam Park and the Taliesin Arts Centre added to the unique opportunity this course afforded every participant. Performance and Production skills were challenging and the pace and commitment required from everyone involved, yet again, was met with enthusiasm and determination from all.
Way to Heaven
By Juan Mayorg
Translated by David Johnston
The heart of Europe, 1942. Children playing, lovers’ tiffs, a deserted train station and a ramp rising towards a hanger.
This is what you can see, but what should the Red Cross Representative’s report say?
The play takes its influence from the Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt in 1944, eventually permitted by the Nazi’s after several demands from the Government of Denmark, that an investigation take place into the reports of mass murder. Before the visit 7,503 people were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp to eliminate overcrowding. Theresienstadt was then carefully staged so that the Red Cross visitors saw newly painted flower gardens and freshly painted houses. The 15 page long report failed to raise the question of whether premeditated mass murder was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Juan Mayorga was a participant on the Royal Court’s International Residency 1998. Way to Heaven has previously been produced at the Teatro Maria Guerrero, Madrid by the Centro Dramatico Nacional. His other work has been produced in Spain and around Europe as well as in Argentina, Venezuela and the USA. wgytc’s performance of this work is the first to ever be produced in Wales.
David Johnston is a multi-award winning translator whose work includes plays by Lope de Vega and Calderon for the RSC, and Lorca and Valle-Inclan for the BBC. He has also had a number of original plays performed on stage and radio. He teaches Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast.
“You say ‘him-mel-veck’. It sounds like one word, but it’s two. ‘Himmel’ means ‘heaven’. ‘Weg’ means ‘way’. ‘Himmelweg’: way to heaven.” I heard it for the first time here, in this very place, thirty kilometres north of Berlin. In 1942.”
Red Cross Representative
“Our final objective is to show that everything is possible. Everything is possible. Anything we can dream, we can do. Here, in this world. Even the things we didn’t dare imagine. That ladies and gentleman is what awaits you in the woods.”
Commandant
“Everyone puts on an act at some time. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Gershom Gottfried
Richard III
By William Shakespeare
The late 1920s and early 1930s were a time of civil unrest in Great Britain and across the rest of Europe – protests, riots, recession. An age where media moguls could make Prime Ministers, and the population were becoming jaded with politicians who were consistently breaking their promises. An era strangely akin to today in a number of ways.
Across Europe, a new alternative to the old, hackneyed parties started to spread, and this alternative was yet to become the dirty word that it is today – ‘ Fascism’.
Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain – and in Great Britain it was a man called Sir Oswald Mosley, with his British Union of Fascist Blackshirts in tow, who offered this alternative.
Mosley was a prodigious political talent, with the ability to speak eloquently and passionately for hours on end without either hesitation or the use of prepared notes. Many people believe he could have been either a Conservative or Labour Prime Minister if he had had the patience to the play the system, but his ambition ultimately resulted in his downfall.
It is in the decadent upper-echelons of Mosley’s Britain that our Richard III is set – a time where political structures and relationships were starting to fray and the main players jockeyed for preferment.
“The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch”
Richard III – Act 1, Scene 3
“There are periods in history when change is necessary…the art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age”
Oswald
“Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe”
Richard III – Act 5, Scene 3
“Ideas in a void have never appealed to me; action must follow thought or political life is meaningless.”
Oswald Mosley
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