JOE GILL speaks to the Palestinian students in Gaza whose testimony is collected in a remarkable anthology
Miners’ strike drama hits the wrong notes
DAVID NICHOLSON is disappointed that an ambitious telling of the strike from a Welsh perspective disregards the collective struggle
Odyssey '84 at the Sherman Theatre.
[Mark Douet]
MARY CONWAY delights in a rarely performed comedy that recalls a Britain we remember in our bones
JEAN ROBERTS appreciates the way traditional panto can be remodelled into critique of the academy schools system
MARY CONWAY is riveted by a superbly crafted glimpse into the soul of a cast-off US star
MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
ODYSSEY ’84
Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
PLAYRIGHT Tim Price’s ambitious retelling of the South Wales miners’ contribution to the heroic but doomed year-long strike against pit closures in the mid-1980s is clever, warm and oddly repulsive in its individualism.
Fresh from his success with his play Nye about Bevan and his creation of the NHS, Price has turned his attention to another labour movement epic, weaving the story of the South Wales miners’ part in the strike based on the Greek tale of Homer’s The Odyssey.
The device works well in parts, showing the journey of Rhodri Meilir’s reluctant striker John O’Donnell from a nervous public speaker to travelling the world collecting money for the strike.
Similar stories
PETER LAZENBY is fascinated by a book of cartoons that shows how newspaper cartoonists were employed to, on the one hand, denigrade and, on the other, to defend the miners’ strike of 1984-85
With solidarity coming in from across Britain and the world, PETER LAZENBY speaks to the people who made Christmas 1984 a celebration of working-class resistance in Britain’s striking coalmining communities