Theatre review: Byth Bythoedd Amen by Mared Jarman

Jon Gower

Exploring the subject of nights out in Cardiff has proved to be fecund source of material for Welsh dramatists in recent years.

There was Roger Williams’ ‘Saturday Night Forever,’ a tender account of the love between Lee and Matthew, with that tenderness offset against savage homophobia, first set in the 1990s, then updated for a restaging in 2015.

Then there was Daf James’ ‘Llwyth (Tribe),’ featuring four gay friends on a rugby international night in the city.

Following on from such plays, the latest exploration of Cardiff’s sometimes tawdry nightlife is Mared Jarman’s ‘Byth Bythoedd,’ which had much of the audience on its feet for last night’s preview performance at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre.

It opens with Lottie fellating a Tinder date from the Valleys in a room at the Hilton which soon turns into something nasty, although Jarman, who both created and plays Lottie suggests strongly that Lottie has agency in this, that she has chosen to be here and to do this, not least when she walks away with some plastic notes from the stranger’s wallet.

Hallucinatory sequences

The play then careers through the city streets in hallucinatory sequences which meld the past and the present, as Lottie is coming to terms with the death of her best friend Bennie, whose funeral she missed.

Which makes this a play about ghosts and memory, full of complexity and layering which director Rhian Blythe teases out into clear threads before tying them back together again.

Blythe hoped the play would unsettle people and this is very definitely achieved, not least because the disabled actors on stage can say things that others couldn’t, so we have a string of gags about missing a hand delivered by an actor who is missing a hand. Blindness is a subject throughout, but presented with a searching and revealing honesty.

Jarman holds the first half of the play together pretty much by herself, often mesmerisingly so and entertainingly able to summon up an array of different characters with their local; accents. She holds the floor until she is joined by Paul Davies, who variously and effortlessly inhabits a small cast of characters, including Lottie’s best friend Bennie, a night club doorman and a very funny drag queen.

The chemistry between them is palpable and there are touching moments of tenderness and togetherness not to mention some fab dance routines. It was perhaps a shame Davies only fully comes into his own to inhabit the second half of ‘Byth Bythoedd’ and this seems like a dramaturgical mis-step, although when he does join the journey into night it adds crackles of energy, not least in a very effective karaoke scene.

The music, much of it by Eadyth Crawford adds pump and pulse to the tickertape dialogue as the play moves from a hospital ward in Lottie’s childhood through rammed nightclub dance floors to Bennie’s flat where she discovers his body and invokes his spirit.

It is also, pretty centrally a play about the sex lives of disabled people. Lottie is blind, as is her creator Mared Jarman, who has a degenerative eye condition which worsened considerably when she was fourteen.

Covid lockdown

The play had its genesis in the Covid lockdown which Jarman describes as being “A relief for disabled people. Finally, everyone was experiencing the limitations and obstacles that affect the disabled community every day.

“I was inspired to respond to this time and – like a lot of people – I turned to writing. As a disabled actor, I never had the opportunity to play characters or share stories that were similar to my own experiences.

“I wanted a character I felt passionately about, a character where I didn’t have to mask my sight loss, someone who was experiencing life like I do!”

The language of the piece is beyond the quaint hybridity of Wenglish, a sort of urban pidgin which freely mixes up English and Welsh into a dizzying mix.

It’s not a play to please the language police, that’s for certain but it reminds us how far the language had adapted and updated since the days of the first forays into writing about the city in Sion Eirian’s novel ‘Bob yn y Ddinas’ and his plays such as ‘Epa yn y Parlwr Gefn’ about Cardiff brothels.

Jarman is very good on the details of Cardiff life, especially the gender fluidity and social groupings of people on their nights out, from the boorish machismo of ‘roid pumped men through the zombified denizens of Queen Street to drag queens dressed more outrageously than peacocks.

The local audience seemed to relish the idiocy, for instance, of choosing Chapter Arts Centre for a first date, ‘hardly a boner’ as Lottie puts it. There’s also the appearance of beloved local character Ninja, although on this particular occasion Lottie isn’t in the mood for his kind of ‘spoken word and bin drumming.’ Undoubtedly some of these references will be lost on the good people of Rhosllanerchrugog and Felinfach as it tours the land but for the Cardiff audience it offered lots of extra things to relish.

The play ends with a very simple coup de theatre which will be familiar from plays such as Conar McPherson ‘The Weir’ and I’ll studiedly give nothing away, other than to say they dial it all down deftly, keep it very simple and it works.

Should you not speak Welsh don’t be put off by the fact that this is a Theatr Cymru production as there’s captioning in both languages. It’s such a promising, zesty and meaningful play by a debut writer that it signals very special things to come from this young writer.

You might come away as I did with the words still tumbling through my head, charged up by the vitality of the language of the piece. Or thinking, too about the title of the play, two words found almost at the end of the Lord’s Prayer which lead to that inevitable, inescapable amen, which turns the whole play into a sort of disjointed prayer against loneliness.

And if you don’t get anything like those you’ll get something else, because this a play fair packed with stuff, not least an enormous amount of sassy verbal energy all delivered by two ace actors who give it their entertaining all.

Byth Bythoedd continues at the Sherman before touring Wales.