Our second voyage to the National Theatre instilled more excitement than the first, at least for me. Between being more familiar with The Corn is Green than The Father and the Assassin and gaining first-hand knowledge about the quality of production the National is capable of, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing the play we read in class come to life.
We were in the Lyttelton Theatre, a different space than the previous performance, which was a proscenium with minimal, if any, playing space forward of the curtain. While proscenium is certainly the most common stage configuration in contemporary theatre, the use of it in this production was far from typical. For the length of the first act, all of the events of Williams’ story happened on a simple platform without any masking behind it, so all of the stage’s internal workings like fly rails and lights were visible to the audience. The second act saw the introduction of a larger, unmoving set of a house interior that reduced the view into the backstage and, during the last scene, masking flew into place and blocked that view, forcing all focus onto the happenings inside the house. Aside from providing an interesting sneak peek at a part of the facility that is usually hidden, it contributed to the feeling of the visuals onstage being more and more developed as the action of the play develops, which I will expound upon shortly.
This production devised a sort of prologue and accompanying scenes interspersed at different points of the play’s events that, rather than expanding the world of the play, provides an imagining of the playwright’s life, emotional states, and method as he wrote The Corn is Green. To elaborate, the start of the show finds Emlyn Williams at a party, and subsequently called to his typewriter by a chorus of miners to begin writing the play The Corn is Green. As the play proper goes on, Williams stands on the edge of the scene speaking certain stage directions aloud and occasionally inserting himself into the action to alter or correct the story as he develops it.
This surprised me, but I quickly fell in love with that creative decision. By making the events of the original play be a story that the character of Emlyn Williams is creating, simpler set pieces and blocking, as well as the aforementioned exposed workings of the theater, all serve to show the development of the story in Williams’ mind from a concept to a complete play (while also conveniently lowering the technical demands of the production). It gives the audience a second story to follow without adding any clutter or clunkiness, and, most meaningfully, it presents in Williams a “real life” example of the importance of education and what it can do for an individual.
In the play proper, the ensemble of miners served the practical purposes of bringing set dressing and props into the scene, at least in the first act, and filling up seats during the one large schoolhouse scene. Outside of that, they interact with Williams and sing rather beautifully in Welsh during the added Emlyn Williams moments, representing both the poor mining community of his own upbringing and his own identity as a Welshman compelling him to write the play (they also sing on the outskirts of the play proper on a few occasions, representing the Welsh background and the reality of life in the mines embedded in the children Ms. Moffat is attempting to teach).
Experiencing the play live enriched the story tenfold for me. It made several moments that never seemed noteworthy incredibly funny, and the character portrayals, particularly those of Ms. Moffat and Morgan Evans, were strong and engaging. Very close to the end of the play, shortly before Morgan walks away from Ms. Moffat for the last time, Emlyn steps in and briefly replaces Morgan, speaking his lines to Ms. Moffat who, in that moment, became the instructor who nurtured Williams’ potential and enabled him to, as Morgan put it, get over the “stone wall” that separated where he was from the rest of the world.
I view this play, now, as a love letter to education, written with characters analogous to the playwright’s own life, and it reawakened the motivations that lead me to become a teacher in the future.
Theatre in London U of A 