The Welsh play that’s going down a storm in Belgium and France

Luke James, Brussels

Nestled among the trees in Brussels’ grand Bois de la Cambre park-come-forest and neighbouring a plush brasserie, the cosy Theatre de Poche (pocket theatre) couldn’t seem further from the run down terraced streets of post-industrial Cardiff at the height of austerity.

At least that is the impression created by Gwendoline Gauthier’s powerful performance of Iphigenia in Splott, a one-woman reinterpretation of a Greek tragedy by Welsh playwright Gary Owen, which is successfully shaking the consciousness of French-speaking audiences about the consequences of cuts to public services, following critical acclaim in English and Welsh.

Gauthier admits she found it a “bit intimidating” to walk in the footsteps of Effie, a young woman who exists precariously on the fringes of the capital through a permanent hangover, down Queen Street on a Saturday night as part of her research for the role.

“I was alone and I didn’t dare to drink anything,” she says of her visit to the Great Western, the pub where Effie’s luck seems about to change after catching the eye of an army veteran.

Splott

Although, speaking to Nation.Cymru before a sold out Saturday night performance, the Bergerac-born actor said that Splott was “less run down than I imagined” after reading the script.

“I really loved Cardiff,” she added. “I thought it was a very beautiful city, very lively. The people were very kind. They talked a lot.”

Recreating Effie’s stride of pride back from her night spent with the ex-soldier was particularly memorable. “I did a very beautiful walk which is part of the play,” said the 36-year-old.

“It crosses the park and then it goes along the railways. There are ponies and at the end of the road there is the sea. This kind of abandoned beach that reminds you of where you are on the map because I didn’t have the impression at all that we were by the sea.”

None of the locations or cultural references have been adapted to more easily connect with a Francophone audience.

The Belgian media told its readers to imagine the play is set in the country’s struggling former mining towns of Charleroi or La Louvière, while Gauthier’s French interpretation of Effie’s ‘Kardiff’ accent resembles the ‘ch’ti’ dialect spoken in the post-industrial north east of the country.

Musicians

The most noticeable difference with the original play, which was first staged at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre in 2015, is the presence on stage of three musicians, who provide an increasingly tense soundtrack to help magnify Effie’s emotions.

“The director wanted me to start very quickly, very fast, very angry,” said Gauthier.

“He often told me that I had to start already tired. Because I think that it allows you to be more sensitive to emotions, and a way of living which is permanently tiring, always drinking alcohol – a really hard daily life.”

Gauthier, who held down a number of day jobs in Paris before moving to Liege to train as an actor, has now embodied Effie’s exhausting encounter with motherhood in the age of austerity more than 150 times across Belgium and France, including dozens of performances during which she herself was pregnant.

“It was weird,” she said. “When I was pregnant, I was able to cut myself off from my emotions, from my pregnancy. But during the birth, I realised this is how she must have felt.”

In the play, Effie gives birth to a baby girl in the back of an ambulance due to healthcare cuts which force her to make a difficult journey to a better equipped hospital during bad weather.

“During the pregnancy, I didn’t want to know if it was a girl or a boy,” Gauthier adds. “And when she was born and I saw that it was a girl, one of the first things I thought was I could never play this role again, never again.”

Yet three months later, the 36-year-old was back on the road and breastfeeding her baby daughter in hotels across France around performances, which included a month-long run at the world renowned Avignon Theatre Festival.

Real life

Audiences in France are particularly hungry to see real life represented on stage as a result of a reluctance to sully the language of Molière, Gauthier believes.

“There is a culture of language, of words, of poetry,” she explained. “I think it’s a bit like in Italy with painting. The heritage crushes everything else. It’s magnificent and at the same time crushing. There’s a sense of embarrassment around doing political theatre.”

Ultimately though she puts the success of a play about a small part of Cardiff down to a universal problem: the failure of politicians to understand the impact of their decisions on people.

The return of Iphigenia in Splott for a second run in Brussels comes shortly after the formation in Belgium of a right-wing coalition government which used its first budget to cut healthcare funding and welfare payments.

“Politics can be abstract for people,” said Gauthier. “When you live in comfort, when you have money, you don’t realise that taking money from certain organisations, from certain institutions, really kills people. It’s not an abstract idea. It physically hurts people.”