DepartmentalResearchConferenceAbstracts
Theatre,FilmandTVStudies
17th-19thMarch2015
All events take place in the Council Chambers NLW unless otherwise stated
Tuesday 17th March
11.30-1pm Panel 1: Raiders of the Lost Archive (Chair: Lara Kipp)
Towards ‘Ivor Davies: Silent Explosion’ - Curating an Exhibition of Destruction in Art at National
Museum Wales
Judit Bodor
This paper will look at how to curate ephemeral, process-based contemporary artwork in museums,
considering the problem of ‘extending the life’ (Allsopp 2006) of work that incorporates material
destruction and precarity. The aim in so doing is to rethink museological exhibition strategies in
practice to inform my objective of co-curating a retrospective of Welsh artist Ivor Davies at National
Museum Wales to open in 2015. Following a brief review of mainly archival methodologies applied
in the first year of my research, I will survey chronological and thematic exhibitions of destruction in
art such as Out of Actions (1998), Exploding Utopias (2013), and Damage Control (2014). I will
discuss the separate but related problems of ‘authenticity’ of art historical understanding on the one
hand and of a viewer’s sensory engagement with the ‘original’ work on the other. In responding to
the challenge of curating Ivor Davies’ historical ‘auto-destructive’ works, I will then introduce the
potential of ‘narrative’ exhibition making through reference to Ydessa Henedeles’ Partners (2003). I
will finally outline my current enquiry into exhibition as ‘discursive space’ and how scenography
could help exhibit the precarious artworks of Davies such as the 1966 ‘Silent Explosion’.
Troubled Water, Stormy Futures: Heritage in times of Accelerated Climate Change
Reuben Knutson
This paper will be presented in the context of an AHRC Care for the Future project titled Troubled
Waters, Stormy Futures: Heritage Loss in times of Accelerated Climate Change, and relate this
project to my own PhD research. I will think through approaches to historiography seen in artists’
use of history and historical re-enactment with particular reference to my PhD exhibition (held in
September 2014) which contained a mixture of film, photographs, texts and obsolete technology. I
will show how the exhibition enabled a consideration of history, archives and heritage as unfixed,
whose meaning might be changed or reconfigured according to each renewed sense of
utopia/dystopia, switching between nostalgia for a lost golden age to a critical warning for the
present/future via an ‘affective’ history.
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Turning the Key: What Unlocking Archives Can Mean for Artistic Venues (part 1: workshop)
Kerrie Reading
What do document remains currently kept “behind-the-scenes” offer our understanding of our
recent artistic past? How can they be reactivated in a performative setting?
Matthew Reason (2003) has proposed that what is left over from performance is detritus; and Mike
Pearson and Michael Shanks (2001) have suggested of re-enactments that instead of acts of
reconstruction they can be regarded as acts of recontextualisation. Taking these terms as starting
points I will consider their implications for an approach to document remains of a venue. I will test
out with participants whether it is possible to recontextualise such documents by approaching them
as detritus rather than as fixed and authoritative remains. Can they become the impetus to create
new pieces of work that speak of the past but are very much situated in the present? Using a
selection of documents from my doctoral research at Chapter Arts Centre, participants will work
together in groups of four on a task to respond to materials that are considered as “archive” and
create something new from these documents that offers a creative approach to our recent artistic
past.
This is a methodological enquiry that seeks to ask what document remains can offer an artistic
venue in regards to unlocking its heritage, informing its current policies and considering its future.
Instead of archives remaining locked away can they be reanimated and brought into the public
domain and considered as creative resources for the present, whilst simultaneously acting as access
points to our understanding of the past?
2-3.30pm
Keynote Address 1: (Chair: Prof. Heike Roms) Venue: DRWM
Practice as Research and the Problem of Knowledge
Professor Emeritus Robin Nelson (Manchester Metropolitan University)
This presentation offers advice to arts practitioners who aim to become practitioner-researchers. It
culminates in a model for conducting PaR. By way of argument, the presentation posits that Practice
as Research amounts to a new methodology in a spectrum of established research methodologies. It
outlines historical shifts in what counts as knowledge in the academy such that creative arts
practices now have a place.
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4-4.45pm
Panel 2: The Good, the Bad and the Fans: Challenging
Hierarchy and Perceived Norms
(Chair: Wikanda Promkhuntong) Venue: DRWM
Intra-Fandom Conflicts, Virtual Heterotopias, and the Controversy of Real Person Fiction
Jennifer Spence
While some scholarship treats fans as a unified homogenous group, this argues that a single fandom
actually consists of multiple smaller fan communities and spaces, which Rhiannon Bury (expanding
on Foucault) has called “virtual heterotopias”. Although these heterotopias all share the common
interest in the initial fan object, they are often at odds with each other following the introduction of
a contentious derivative fan object such as “RPF” (“Real Person Fiction”, fan-written stories starring
public figures instead of fictional characters). Drawing on affect theory, I argue that RPF is coded as
an “unhappy” fan object. Previous work has been done on how fans come together over a happy
object, but my project looks at the process in reverse: how do fandoms split and fragment over an
unhappy object? How do fans create virtual heterotopias, and how do they interact with one
another? Through online ethnography, discourse analysis, and case studies of The Lord of the Rings
(2001-2003) films, TV program Supernatural (2005-present), and contemporary UK boyband One
Direction, my project contributes to a better understanding of how particular objects endemic to
fandom can generate particular reactions and affective relationships among fans.
“I will throw you off your ship and you will drown and die”: Larry Stylinson, Crazy about One
Direction and Inter-fandom Hate
Bethan Jones
In 2013, Daisy Asquith’s Crazy About One Direction – a documentary about teenage One Direction
fans – aired on Channel Four. The film’s reception was mixed, with critics bemoaning the state of
contemporary music and girls’ desires being written off as immature and pathetic (see also: Twilight
and Fifty Shades of Grey). Some of the most extreme reactions came from One Direction fans
themselves. But Instead of being aimed at the producer, they were aimed at other fans of the band –
Larry Stylinson shippers.
Derived from the names of Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, Larry Stylinson fans imagine the boys
to be in a gay relationship, kept under wraps by the band’s management. These shippers are often
reviled in One Direction fandom and are the subject of bullying on various social media networks.
Following the documentary this increased, with some One Direction fans tweeting that they wished
the shippers would die. This paper examines depictions of Stylinson shippers in the media and
fandom responses. I draw on Matt Hill’s work on inter-fandom hate to analyse intra-fandom
tensions, and examine the contentious role that real person fiction plays in fandom and depictions
of fans.
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The Good Fan
Sophie Charlotte van de Goor
This paper draws on from my current research project, which challenges established scholarship on
slash fan culture. Slash fan culture focuses on homoerotic subtext in media texts and reworks these
texts to create fan works featuring male/male sexual relationships between the appropriated
characters, generally considered non-homosexual in the original media or canon. Current scholarship
views slash fan culture monolithically as women radically rewriting gender roles (Jung, 2004:35;
Busse, 2005:14; Sandvoss, 2011:56). The conceptualisation of slash fan culture has been that of a
resistant subcultural activity, forming part of a celebratory view of fan cultures as participatory
heterotopias (Jenkins & Deuze, 2008:9; Booth, 2010:20; Bury, 2004:np). This view neglects the
homogenising effects of habitus - the force of habit and internalised social behavioural norms - on
fan behaviour, leading to marginalisation of non-conforming groups both in fan communities and
academia and tensions between different groups (Brennan, 2013:4; Morimoto 2014:np). This paper
demonstrates how the perceived naturalness of behaviour and the enforcing of community
condoned behaviour, creates situations that challenge the assumed naturalness of both fan
communities, as well as fan studies theory. It will do this through Bourdieu's concept of habitus and
Stuart Hall's anthropological argument for 'the other'.
Challenging the Concepts of 'Humanity': Furry's Resistance to Hegemony via the Apparatuses of
Animality
Brenton Nathanial Spivey
Resistance has been one of the core elements of subcultural participation for scholars studying this
topic. Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) refined the concept
of resistance while working on the symbolic resistance exhibited by youth in opposition to the
‘mainstream’ or hegemonic elements of society. For youth cultures, this class-based resistance was
achieved through style. Style, in this case, included clothing, demeanor, and vernacular (Hebdige
1979). Following such classic subcultural theory, it may seem that Furry is resisting in related ways,
especially through style. Undoubtedly the donning of Fursuits and tails could be equated with this.
Consequently, this paper will provide criticism of the Spectacle Performance Paradigm (Abercrombie
and Longhurst 1998) – which moves away ‘resistance’ – instead exploring a specific form of
resistance mapped out by Foucauldian power and biosemiotics. Further, I will show that Furry resists
hegemony in the form of challenging concepts of humanity – via the “Apparatuses of Animality”
(Thierman 2010) – rather than simply resisting the mainstream in class-oriented ways. Thus both
CCCS and SPP models need to be revised and complicated here.
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7-9pm
Panel 3: Practice-based Paper and Performances
(Chair: Branwen Davies) Venue: The Foundry Studio, Parry Williams Building
Rehearsals for a Birth Story
Tracy Evans
I have built a listening chamber so that I might hear myself better. I am attempting to have a
conversation with myself. Perhaps when the speaking voices and the speaking body are amplified I
will hear something I haven’t heard before. Maybe this will change everything.
The listening chamber is a scenographic construction that uses digital technologies to manipulate
sound and image, using principles of interruption, repetition, echo and reverberation. These are
combined with live spoken text and physical action in a performance which explores ideas of
memory and time/space in relation to the construction of personal narratives.
This performance is the second practical part of my PAR PhD project, ‘Performing Birth Stories:
Narrative and Caesura’. My research explores the ways in which women write and perform their
birth stories. It is concerned with strategies for deep listening and finding ways to articulate the
caesura, or gap, that exists in (inter-) subjective experience. This is situated within a Feminist critical
discourse that considers the ways in which autobiographical performance can resist and disrupt the
wider cultural discourses that operate to construct subjects. This research is funded by the Theatre
& Film Studies Department, Aberystwyth University (DCDS 1 year) and the Arts & Humanities
Research Council (2 years). Supervisors: Jill Greenhalgh and Dr Karoline Gritzner.
Turning the Key: What Unlocking Archives Can Mean for Artistic Venues (part 2: presentation)
Kerrie Reading
See Panel 1 for full abstract
Testing the Parameters: Flags as Visual Displays of Territorial Control and as Cultural Markers
Paul Jones
During the 2014 National Eisteddfod held at Llanelli, in the Eisteddfod’s Lle Celf exhibition space, I
exhibited two flags with which I aimed to question notions of identity and culture. The work
intended to test social-political positions and open up a discourse about the dismantlement of - and
more dramatically the death of – ‘Britishness’.
In his 1966 publication Prydeindod (Britishness), J.R. Jones proposes that the concept of Welsh as a
cultural marker was in danger of extinction. The two enmeshed elements of territory and language
that make up a culture were gradually being eroded to the point that, once their connection was
broken, Welsh as a distinguishable identity would no longer exist.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2007) observes that flags are hollow vessels are ready to be filled with
context, whether that be political, religious or cultural. The more a flag can be filled with various
symbolic meaning the stronger its power in creating emotional responses that unite or untie a
people’s sense of being.
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For this conference I will present my Eisteddfod flag pieces as part of my current practice-based
research, which focuses on the use of flags as visual displays of territorial control and as cultural
markers, particular in regard to anglicised border regions of North East Wales. Britishness is about
the promotion of a united sense of belonging to one nation. However, in light of the recent Scottish
independence referendum this notion of union is once again being passionately debated.
Wednesday 18th March
10-11.30
Keynote Address 2: (Chair: Dr. Glen Creeber)
What Kind of Film and TV Histories Do We Need?
Prof. John Ellis (Royal Holloway)
All films are documentaries. All films are data. There is no such thing as a definitive film or television
text. Now that moving image and sound are becoming as important as writing in everyday
communication, the question of how to study TV and film historically is taking on an increased
urgency.
12-1.30
Panel 4: The Personal and the Political: Performing and
Representing Identity and Culture (Chair: Gregor Cameron)
A Multi-strand Thematic Approach to Understanding Preadolescence, Linguistic Identities and
Minority Language Media
Helen Davies
The overarching focus of this thesis is the role that the media play in the lives of young bilingual
children in Wales, and whether the media play a part in mediating or maintaining children’s
perceptions of their own cultural and linguistic identities. My research focuses on children during the
transitional phase between primary and secondary school (i.e. children between the ages of 10- and
12-years-old), a phase often referred to as preadolescence, where ‘identity’ is arguably in flux.
As a multidisciplinary study combining childhood studies, media studies and sociolinguistics,
developing an appropriate methodology to analyse my findings has, at times, been challenging. The
aim of this paper is to present the multi-strand thematic analysis approach that was formulated to
answer my research questions. The three areas of interest, referred to as primary themes, are
media, language and childhood. The secondary themes represent the way in which each primary
theme is discussed in relation to the project, and these are organised around three increasingly
focused sub-headings: ‘general’, ‘project-specific’and ‘core’.
This paper will present the systematic approach to coding transcribed talk used to formulate both
the primary and secondary themes, together with some critical reflections on how the use of
thematic analysis has enabled the project to be anchored in the context of the participants.
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Case Study: Press Coverage of the 2012 Language Referendum in Latvia
Madara Veipa
On the 18th of February 2012 more than 70 per cent of all eligible voters partook in a referendum in
Latvia. The referendum called for amendments to the Latvian constitution, which would allow
Russian to become an official language alongside Latvian. Whilst the referendum went against the
recognition of the Russian language as an official language, it highlighted the split between Latvian
and Russian speakers in Latvia. This paper will analyse the newspaper coverage of the 15 weeks
preceding, and the first week following the referendum and will provide an insight into the ways in
which the Latvian-language newspapers represent the Russian minority in Latvia. Furthermore, the
paper will address the main differences between the three national Latvian-language newspapers,
based on the analysis of the referendum coverage.
Ashura in Piraeus: The Performance and Politics of Lamentation by Shia Pakistani Migrants in
Greece
Marios Chatziprokopiou
Ashura is the tenth day of the Islamic month Muharram. In Shi’ism, Ashura signifies the
commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of Muhammad, who was defeated in
680 C.E. by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. This event has often been used by Shia
communities as a political paradigm of their minoritarian position in the Islamic world, and of their
eventual resistance against oppressive powers. During the first ten days of Muharram, Shia
communities gradually reenact Hussain's martyrdom through ritual lamentation, including
narrations, chants, weeping, chest-beating, and self-flagellation.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2014 among a Pakistani Shia community in Piraeus, I investigate
how the aforementioned political and performative aspects of Ashura are displayed in the context of
contemporary Greece, marked by increasing xenophobia and the rise of the extreme right. Focusing
on the discourses that my interlocutors produced about their action, I interrogate a) the extent to
which, through their lamentation, they enact -or, on the contrary, suspend- possible grievances
related to their minoritarian status as migrants in Greece, and b) the ways through which they try to
legitimize their religious praxis, often by employing parallels with unofficial Greek Orthodox
practices, rather than arguments on multiculturalism.
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2.30-4pm
Panel 5: Uncovering Histories: Texts and Contexts
(Chair: Dr. Kim Knowles)
Stalin’s Mickey Mouse: Colored Cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s
Prof. Birgit Beumers
In 1936, when Technicolor was not accessible for Soviet filmmakers, Pavel Mershin developed a
three-strip color system. The Soviet film industry could not only do better than Hollywood, but also
encouraged competition between Moscow and Leningrad inventors who worked with different color
systems.
During the late 1930s and 1940s, about a dozen cartoons were created at Mosfilm and Lenfilm. Since
the systems in which they were made are now obsolete, the films were relegated to the shelves until
their restoration in recent years.
This paper analyses the technological innovations of the different color systems and compares the
result. It explores the effect of color in the cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s and assesses to what
degree the color effects were comparable to Technicolor, and to what extent they shaped the
aesthetic development of the cartoon around the time of the formation in 1936 of Soyuzmultfilm,
the studio often held responsible for the destruction of experiments with animation aesthetics.
‘Nothing But Shadows’: Collage Documentary and the Residue of Family Trauma
Dr Greg Bevan
I define collage as a collection of disparate, unconnected elements, each with its own set of signifiers
and codes, removed from their original contexts and assembled to create an alternative composition
with a new meaning. The textural quality of materials can vary significantly, and can constitute little
more than scraps with frayed, cut or torn edges. Deriving from the French word ‘to glue’, much of
the process of compiling collage documentary relies on impulse and randomness, rearranging
images, sounds and sequences in much the same way as a collage artist (or child) assembles and
reassembles their materials into numerous combinations before deciding on the final arrangement
and gluing them to the canvas. The materials used in collage are often highly charged with personal,
social, psychological, political and ideological implications; this suggests an alternative and, perhaps,
more appropriate way for documentary to explore disparate memories, experiences, thoughts and
emotions, particularly where evidence or testimony is absent, inadequate or unreliable. The
production of all documentaries, regardless of formal method, is based on the selection,
juxtaposition and manipulation of elements that refer and signify; and, by foregrounding the
practice and principles of collage, how can the formal language and thematic terrain of documentary
be extended?
This paper will include a selection of clips from the film Dim Ond Cysgodion (Nothing but Shadows),
an experimental collage documentary about inter-generational conflict, the transference of
knowledge and ideologies, the struggle for language and individuality, the conflict between facts and
imagination and the development of an independent authorial and personal voice.
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Doctor Who’s Travels in Space and Time with BBC Worldwide: Fantasizing/Protecting a ‘British’
Brand?
Prof Matt Hills
In the contemporary TV marketplace the BBC has discursively separated out its “global” and
“national” operations, resulting in tensions between Worldwide (the BBC’s commercial/overseas
arm) and BBC production (UK public service). This results in a kind of co-promotion rather than full
co-production, as Doctor Who is (dis)placed in very different BBC contexts.
Several events in 2014 illustrated BBC/Worldwide differences. Firstly, Doctor Who embarked on a
publicity ‘World Tour’. Plans to livestream events were announced by Worldwide, and then promptly
shelved after hostile fan responses to the first non-UK Q&A, as if to protect the brand in a public
service context. Secondly, Worldwide’s Miami office stored scripts and episodes (to be subtitled) on
an accessible server. As a result of this “leak”, Worldwide had to apologize publicly to the show’s
production team, and possible brand damage again had to be carefully managed.
Elke Weissmann suggests that national discourses of ‘quality TV’ act as a “fantasy” of authentication
in transnational markets (2012:185). But fantasies of British authenticity in play around Who have
also been complicated by (trans)national discourses of brand management, as this work will
demonstrate.
4.30-6pm
Panel 6: Let’s Play Wrestling with Authorship
(Chair: Madara Veipa)
Players as Producers and Panderers: Let's Play and the Pleasures of Vicarious Interactivity
Tom Hale
There is still fraught discussion about how best to approach the medium of videogames from an
academic perspective, with writers such as Garry Crawford and James Newman, as well as critics and
developers like Anna Anthropy and Ian Bogost, highlighting the lived gameplay experience as
described by players as one of the most important resources available to scholars. However, there
has been no adequate discussion in peer-reviewed academia of the Let’s Play phenomenon, in which
players record and commentate on their gameplay and share these recordings online. My research
will focus on Let’s Play as both text and metatext, with particular focus given to the fandoms that
have risen up around creating, sharing and discussing these videos. My research will include textual
analysis of LP videos; I will also address the ways in which LP video producers and their fans discuss
the phenomenon, its origins and appeal; comparing different discursive narratives and themes in
order to explore these previously ignored connections between fan production and vicarious
engagement with media texts. I assert that the internal hierarchies in LP and videogame fandom
represent a porous relationship between producer and spectator. Thus, I will be demonstrating how
Let’s Play provides an invaluable resource for understanding videogames as media texts.
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‘Blissfully Yours’: Film Festival Archives and an Auteur in the Making
Wikanda (Tan) Promkhuntong
The director of Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux, said to Screen Daily in 2007 that ‘[s]tars
protect the auteurs but without the auteurs there wouldn’t be a festival.’ This statement reflects a
long-standing relationship between the institution of the film festival and the construction of film
directors as ‘auteurs’. With the growth of film festivals worldwide and the recognition of East Asian
directors at festival circuits in the last two decades, this paper examines the context of film festival
exhibition and its archive as a collection of auteur para-textual materials. The paper discusses the
knowledge construction of film authorship through discourses associated with aesthetic innovation
and geopolitics, embedded in various online archive and audio-visual materials on film funding and
thematic programming. Taking Rotterdam Film Festival and the Thai film director/visual artist
Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a case in point, my findings reveal how the festival updates the
notion of authorship through thematic programmes on South East Asian cinema and cross-media
shorts. Through this platform, the figure of an auteur is also hybridised between film
director/artist/producer and funding committee/curator/festival director who take turn to be stars
of the festival. Through this collaboration, the branding of the festival is simultaneously a reputationmaking tool for the director.
Wrestling With Stardom: Gods and Gladiators
Thomas Huw Alcott
In March 2013 the biggest wrestling fan magazine in the UK ‘Power slam: The Wrestling Magazine’
ran a seven-part series on the history of the WWWF/WWF/WWE Championship. The articles
chronicled the highs and lows of the main creative and business movements of the WWE over its 50
year history and editor Fin Martin was led to a simple and definitive conclusion: that ‘If we have
learned anything from this series…on the WWWF/WWF/WWE title, it’s that every boom period can
be traced to the creation of a new star’ (p31).
The importance of the wrestling star as an individual is paramount to the WWE, creatively and
athletically through storylines, engaging characters and good performances in the ring and
commercially. Star images are used to hype and promote WWE events to its own audience and are
disseminated across a range of other fields and media to entice new fans.
P. David Marshall (1997) argues that different industries produce their celebrities in different ways
and that through this they generate different meanings. This paper aims to unravel two of the key
areas that go towards defining the wrestling star in his/her own terms by looking at how wrestlers
are promoted and presented as extraordinary individuals and by historicising the origins of the
theatrical combat star.
6.30pm
Wine & Informal Evening Talk with Prof. Heike Roms and
Dr. Paul Newland
(Chair: Thomas Huw Alcott) Venue: The Foundry Studio, Parry Williams Building
Light refreshment provided
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Thursday 19th March
10-11.30am
Panel 7: Theatrical Layers: Design, the Actor and the Text
(Chair: Marios Chatziprokopiou)
‘What is this place…?‘: Spatial Instability as Core Performative Feature in Howard Barker’s Und
and A House of Correction
Lara Kipp
Howard Barker’s scenography presents a core performative feature of his work that has been
hitherto neglected in scholarship. Since 1998, he has engaged scenographically with his own
playwriting, taking responsibility for set and costume and, more recently, sound. The fusion of onstage and backstage roles offers insight into ways in which Barker’s plays already anticipate their
eventual theatrical realisation.
This paper argues that Barker’s work as playwright not only takes into account but elevates and
depends on production design for successful rendition on stage. It proposes a critical textual analysis
of Und (1999) and A House of Correction (2001), drawing on Booth’s understanding of indefinition
(2001) and Lyotard’s conception of the sublime (1989, 1991).
Set design is integral to both plays’ dramatic structure: in Und the titular character supposedly
awaits a gentleman caller; with time, it is discovered that he ‘gathers Jews’ (Barker, 2012: 11) and
she is ‘not an aristocrat’ (Ibid.: 21), but Jewish. As the pretence of a teatime meeting slowly
crumbles, so does the spatial stability of Und’s parlour. Similarly, A House of Corrections sets out
certain spatial premises, only to dismantle them over time. The courier Godansk puzzles ‘What is this
place…?’ (Barker, 2010: 113), a question that remains without definite answer. Both plays depend on
the spatial realisation of set.
Intrusions in the plays are both spatial and sonic; the paper focusses on set and how a definite sense
of space and place is undermined, demonstrating the crucial performative importance of
scenography in Barker’s work.
Where have all the actors gone? Doctor Who and the Changing Face of the Profession
Gregor Cameron
This paper seeks to frame a question that has arisen from my critical literature and affects the way in
which I shall approach my methodology. The term ‘Actor’ recently appears to have become a more
contentious appellation than it has been since Diderot. Discourses surrounding film, television and
performance, their technologies and production, place the actor as both central and peripheral to
the dramatic text. This is often achieved by substituting celebrity or star for the lead, and character
role for those less important to the drive of the story. At the same time the theatre has mobilized to
distance itself from the term in favour of ‘performer’ recognizing that current practice often
emphasizes the performer’s contribution to devising the stage piece. In effect, this results in the
term ‘Actor’ dematerializing through an over generalization of its role in both screen and live
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performance. I hope through the examination of the actors taking the role of ‘The Doctor’ that I may
be able to interrogate the passage of these discourses over the last fifty years or so and thus
investigate how the perception of acting has changed as a profession.
Performing the Language of the Grotesque: The ‘malignant beauty’ of Caradoc Evans’ Taffy
Dr. Liz Jones
The 1923 premier of Taffy at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, was booed and heckled from the
gallery by a group of London Welsh men and women. What unfolded next was to be familiar Evans
territory; a scathing satire on village life and its cunning, hypocritical, chapel-going inhabitants.
Indeed, the play’s provocative title, together with Evans’ notoriety as ‘the best hated man in Wales’,
were enough in themselves to attract a noisy protest.
The press reviews, on the other hand, were far more sanguine. While critics praised the ‘brilliant
company’ - and its star Edith Evans in particular – Taffy’s lack of subtlety and caricatured roles
attracted a lukewarm reception; with most critics measuring the play unfavourably against the
standards of theatrical realism. Yet realism was never Evans’ style. The grotesque broad humour, the
stylised caricatures and mischievous use of an invented ‘Welsh’ speech, mark his work as belonging
to the traditions of broad, satirical comedy.
Twenty years later, Evans’ wife, Marguerite Jervis was to produce Taffy with Rogues and Vagabonds,
her Aberystwyth-based professional theatre company. Despite touring the Welsh-speaking (and
chapel going) rural heartlands, Jervis’ production was well received by audiences and critics alike; a
response which she credits in part to the subtlety of her production and its emphasis on the ‘poetry
of the language’.
In this essay I will explore Evans’ manipulation of language and its potential in performance;
involving as it does (intentional) mis-translations of the Welsh and a marked conflation of Bible
Welsh with the Cardiganshire (Ceredigion) dialect. These layered linguistic devices combine to affect
a comic, grotesque yet at times richly poetic mode of speech; a language which, as Jervis claims,
affects its own ‘malignant beauty.’
11.45-1pm Roundtable: Academia and the Industry – Engaging
and How? (Chair: Prof. Birgit Beumers)
Dr. Kim Knowles, Margaret Ames, Kerrie Reading & Thomas Huw Alcott
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