Theatre review: No Man’s Land

Lewis Davies

At the centre of this hard, visceral play is a compelling performance by Kyle Stead as Lewis: a young, Valleys educated everyman on the wrong side of society.

Lewis is a barman at the social club/community support centre maintained by his mother, Llinos and haunted by his bully of an uncle, an Iraq war veteran and various members of a damaged and extended community.

Lewis is angry, boiling kettle angry, unfulfilled and still traumatised by a childhood dominated by Xbox Call of Duty battlefield attacks and a charismatic older brother who has long escaped to the promised land of university and London.

No Man’s Land may be seen in part as another interpretation of Trezise’s interrogation of Valleys masculinity. Lewis is a step away from the frustrated ambition of Caleb Jenkins in her 2021 novel Easy Meat: Lewis is trying to get his life going.

He has limited choices, he was asleep for most of his GCSE’s, when he was either in the purgatory of repetitive video games or craving the soft comfort of his mother’s bed. He has now developed a latent talent for violence and at keeping people at a distance.

Confidence

The play is confidently directed by Matthew Holmquist and produced by Kyle Stead is co-production with the Sherman Theatre and Rhondda Cynon Taff Theatres with support from Platfform. It is a very welcome and innovative brand of Welsh theatre that has been forgotten, as the institutional support has been absorbed and squandered by the big-ticket productions.

Stead and Trezise have worked together to produce an engaging sixty-minute blast of a drama that has the guile to tell a personal and poignant hidden story.

From the view in row G, the parrying could have had more jokes, always redolent in a Valleys social club, while another future production should put Llinos, Lewis’s mother on the stage. There are too many noises off. The dialogue, as always in Trezise’s work, is good but sometimes a bit of light and shade early on would allow the audience more of a window of empathy.

Entropy 

There were a few unnecessary forays into the cliches of Valley entropy: closed pits, hymn singing, the miner’s strike, machoistic rugby, but overall, the sheer physicality of Stead’s suffering as Lewis kept the momentum going.

The production at the Sherman studio makes the most of the space-in-the-round through Bethan Thomas’s simple but effective two-sided representation of Lewis’s mental state while a perceptive soundscape by David McSparron and a pared-down but effective lighting design by Cara Hood made the most of the action.

The questions asked by the play about whether we can escape or move beyond a traumatic, damaging childhood have been central to Trezise’s work since her first novel In and Out of the Goldfishbowl (2000) and her award-winning play Tonypandemonium (2013), set very much in a valleys woman’s world.

With No Man’s Land she has collaborated effectively with Stead to create a play that has the guts to interrogate the damaged human condition. A man’s world to be sure.

No Man’s Land by Rachel Trezise is showing at the Sherman Theatre until Saturday 18 October, then at the Park and Dare, Treorchy from 23 to 25 October. There is a BSL Interpreted performance on Friday 24 October 7.00pm.