Theatre company returns with six new works tackling life in modern Wales

Nation.Cymru staff

A Cardiff theatre company is returning to making new work this month with six experimental productions exploring subjects ranging from infertility and divorce to gaslighting and the colonisation of Mars.

Fio will stage Provocations at Chapter Arts Centre on Thursday, September 17 and Thursday, September 24, with three works-in-progress presented on each night.

Rather than conventional finished productions, each piece will be developed with actors over a week before being performed for around 30 minutes.

Audiences will then be invited to give their reactions during 15-minute intervals, with food and drink provided in exchange for feedback.

Fio says the project marks a renewed focus on theatre-making following what artistic director Mathilde López describes as a “theatre drought in Wales” which has led to a depletion of different voices.

The first evening will feature After Cordelia, written by Samatar Elmi and directed by López, in which a spoken-word artist persuades her sisters and father to take part in family therapy sessions inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear.

M(other)hood, by Samia Soleman and directed by Lisa Zahra, follows a young Somali woman dealing with infertility and divorce, while Bevin Magama’s one-man MDSF – Magama Does Sci-Fi explores the colonisation of Mars.

The second night will include a contemporary reworking of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, directed by Kevin McCurdy.

It will be followed by Nia Gandhi’s Medusa, a darkly comic story in which a girl discovers Medusa’s head in a Tesco freezer carrier bag behind the petrol station where she grew up.

The final work, Saint Khadija by Rahim El Habachi, follows a recently divorced Moroccan woman who finds a new sense of herself through clubbing, leaving her two sons struggling to understand her transformation.

Drought

López said: “We are coming out of a theatre drought in Wales and the consequent depletion of different voices.

“At Fio we are refocussing the company on theatre-making and fully embracing being outsiders and foreign theatre makers unapologetically present in Cardiff and Wales.

“PROVOCATIONS is our way of testing the ground with ideas and artists, it is a platform for new theatre work and ultimately how the company will programme from now on.”

Fio says the format is intended to allow artists to experiment rather than being required to produce “finished, safe work”, while giving audiences a role in the development process.

Both evenings will include BSL interpretation, while the productions carry content warnings covering miscarriage, violence, alcohol, drugs, domestic and psychological violence and sex.

Tickets for both performances are available through Chapter’s box office. (1)(2)

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