‘Wales has been systematically marginalised for decades’
A new play has lured Rhys Ifans back to his Welsh homeland – but can it save National Theatre Wales? Jasper Rees meets the team
‘I’m a wandering minstrel and I have been for many years,” says Rhys Ifans. “I’ll go and do a job and I’ll stay there until I get the next one. And it suits me.” The 52-year-old actor, who made his name playing wasters such as the scrofulous Spike in the film Notting Hill, is in Cardiff. Densely bearded and lanky, he is appearing at the city’s Sherman Theatre in a new play On Bear Ridge, a Beckettian four-hander by Ed Thomas. It’s set in a snowy wilderness where, in an empty house with no food or fuel, a married couple cling on as the world outside threatens inexorable change. Their only son is already dead and their indigenous language soon will be. On the page, it’s desperately sad and ghoulishly funny.
Ifans plays a butcher called John Daniel and says he signed up after reading just a single exchange. “How did you get to be so old?” asks the wife. “Because time fell asleep in the snow and never told us,” replies the husband. “I just had one of those pins and needles moments and I remember reaching for the phone then to tell my agent,” he says.
Ifans has not always found celebrity a comfortable fit. Tabloids have stereotyped him as a Welsh wassailer in the mould of Richard Burton. Long lenses were trained on his relationships with Sienna Miller and Anna Friel. “I’m very grateful for Spike,” he says now of Notting Hill. “That movie has opened up a lot of doors for me in America. It’s arguably a classic. I’m not grateful to have to talk about it.”
He went on to play Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks in Mr Nice and Peter Cook in Channel 4’s Not Only But Always, a seductive portrayal for which he won a Bafta. He’ll soon be seen as two more real-life figures: journalist Ed Vulliamy in GCHQ thriller Official Secret and, in Misbehaviour, Miss World founder Eric Morley, who sees the pageant interrupted by a feminist protest at the Albert Hall.
But whatever cinema has done for him, theatre is Ifans’s first love. When he was at his Welsh-language secondary school in Mold, Theatr Clwyd opened. “It was like a spaceship landing. I went to see everything and I’d done 20 plays before I went to drama school,” he says.
Recently, Ifans has made his way back to the stage, playing a rough sleeper caught up in Occupy London in Protest Song and a dying monarch in Ionesco’s Exit the King, both at the National. At the Old Vic he was Scrooge and, as Fool to her Lear, witnessed Glenda Jackson’s return to theatre. “It was like standing next to a rolling weather system. Very moving and awe-inspiring and humbling, and I’ll never forget it.”
It was Ed Thomas who lured him back to Wales. On Bear Ridge, Thomas’s first play in 15 years, draws on the writer’s upbringing in the upper Swansea Valley where his parents ran a butcher’s shop and slaughtered livestock on site. As a companion piece to the play, Thomas has made an installation in the remote quarrying village of Penwyllt, where anyone can wander around an artfully fragmented open-air set featuring piled chairs, a mouldering dresser, an abandoned shop. A soundtrack on headphones draws on archival recordings of local inhabitants, long-gone voices chattering away in English and Welsh.
Thomas takes me to Penwyllt. As we scan the epic horizon, he points to a knobbly crag called Crib yr Arth which, in his bilingual childhood, he mistranslated as Bear Ridge. It sounds like somewhere in the Wild West. “I’ve never been to Wyoming,” he says, “but in my mind this is Wyoming. Rather than the Welsh miserabilism of the front room, this is the Wales I know. It’s a big little country.”
It is easy to imagine his intimate epic about the death of a community sprouting here. Back in Cardiff, Ifans insists On Bear Ridge should not be seen as a play about Wales. “Loss of language is not particular to Wales. It happens to be a Welsh voice in this case, but it’s a Welsh play about the rest of the world.”
Either way, it is a timely restorative for National Theatre Wales. The company, which was only established in 2011, has suffered a painful year after 40 Welsh playwrights signed an open letter complaining the company was using too few artists based in Wales. That was followed by another letter from 200 actors concerned about the low production rate – in 2017, there was something by NTW on for only 19 days in the year. Ifans was among the signatories. It was, he
Ifans signed up after reading a single exchange in the script: ‘I just had one of those pins and needles moments’
argues, “a call for a dialogue to begin that was very, very necessary, and I would hope that this production might be a continuation of that.”
In June, after only three years in the job, NTW’S artistic director Kully Thiarai announced her departure. On Bear Ridge was commissioned by her predecessor, John Mcgrath, and came to fruition when Ed Thomas showed it to the Royal Court. In a welcome development that will show off NTW’S work outside Wales, it will travel to London after Cardiff. It is co-produced by the Court, and co-directed by its artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, who knows the travails of running a national company. She ran National Theatre of Scotland and, being what she calls “small-country defensive”, refers to the building on the South Bank in London as the “National Theatre of England”.
“Some of my darkest days were as artistic director of NTS,” she says. “You cannot please everybody yet you feel you have this national responsibility to do that. I think of all the things I didn’t achieve rather than the things I did.”
It won’t be difficult for audiences to impose their own meaning on the play. Arguably it portrays the social conditions which brought about the Welsh support for Brexit. “It was crushing,” says Ifans (who supports independence for Wales). “But I understand it, because the communities that voted for Brexit have been systematically marginalised over decades. And if you ignore their voices, they turn on you.”
He is more optimistic than the play is about the future of the old language. “It isn’t being spoken so much in its strongholds. In Cardiff you hear it everywhere, which is wonderful. You never used to. The other day in Bute Park a family were speaking Welsh, and my head was in the clouds, and I nearly turned to them and said, ‘Oooh! Cymry dych chi! Oh, you’re Welsh!’ And then I realised, ‘Oh my God, you’re in the bloody capital city. What are you thinking?’”