Music has time signatures lending themselves to jigs, waltzes and marches, folk songs and syncopated jazz tunes.  Music can be loud and soft and can move between loud and soft.  The banality of the disco sound is that the rhythm is unvaried and insistent;  the volume is always loud.  Tracks meld into each other and become indistinguishable.

So, whilst the idea of providing a story with a musical background is a fine in principle, using a disco backing has its drawbacks.  Apart from the repetitiveness, you have to shout to make yourself heard above it, which means less flexibility in your voice. That said, whilst I was getting a bit of a headache myself, I did notice other members of the audience were responding to the tracks positively. 

(The fact I dislike disco music didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate the skilful way the DJ – Onai – worked her turntables.  The show depended on her carefully synchronising the sound with the action going on in front of her desk.  She also had to act herself from time to time, changing her role from that of a visible technician to that of a member of the cast, becoming part of the small society who gave the main character her identity.)

I also noticed the audience laughing at the wisecracks that came in over the top of the background noise.  Personally, I don’t find the use of Very Rude Words funny.  I find swearing and the pulling of faces childish rather than witty but stand-up comedy is popular and it seems to require comics to be rude and crude.  Katie Payne’s monologue therefore appeals to a different demographic to that often seen at the theatre.  If utilising contemporary cultural material, like disco music and stand-up routines, pulls in a new crowd, this is reasonable.  I approve of it, even if I don’t like it myself.  There were over a hundred people in the audience at Theatr Clwyd on a Tuesday night, many of whom would not have been drawn by Shakespeare, Beckett or even Alan Ayckbourn.

Still, what Katie Payne – the author as well as the performer of ‘My Mixed Up Tape’ – was saying and energetically doing on stage didn’t interest me until her show changed from being a type of ultra physical stand-up routine and turned into a short play.  It became more serious. This shift coincided with a specific moment in the story she was telling.

The show starts with Psycho Phoebe thrown out of her cousin’s wedding by a ‘neckless’ bouncer.  As she is aggressive, destructive, potty-mouthed and has a huge chip on her shoulder, this seems justified.  The only mystery is why she would want to go back inside where she is not welcome.  She has quarrelled with the guests and despises most of them.  But she does want – or need – to go back in, and the play proper gets under way when she manages to sneak back under the arm of the bouncer. 

Now Katie Payne can show us Phoebe encountering and having to deal with – her cousin, her mother and father, her aunt, her ex-boyfriend and her ex-best friend and another, representative female guest.  What has basically been a long moan up to that point – another verbose complaint about life – becomes a three-dimensional reality.

Katie Payne herself is a stage dynamo, with the agility and the timing of a trained dancer.  She is full of ideas, gestures and postures and I liked those of her jokes that did not depend on obscenities.  She is also an excellent mimic.  This meant that, in between dancing about furiously and talking to the audience she can talk to herself in different voices and accents, establishing credible conversations with others who are not there.  This is clever.  It happens convincingly, and she didn’t appear to put a foot wrong for an hour and a quarter, despite the necessary speed of her delivery.  Phoebe’s story is not a complex one but reconstructing it in detail whilst sustaining the pace is no mean task.

When the show does become three-dimensional, building the agendas of an imaginary set of characters, it starts to have a lot more impact.  Up until the moment when Phoebe gets back in to rejoin the wedding crowd, I was wondering, why bother with this story?  Why use this level of theatrical skill and creativity to foreground someone so unpleasant?  However, the effort Katie Payne was putting in gradually started to achieve the result she was after.  Phoebe became more than just the sum of her parts.  We got to see behind her clown mask and find out who she really was behind her posturing.

Returning to hometown Pontypridd after vowing to shake its dust from her shoes was not much fun for Phoebe.  She was never going to give a rendition of The Green, Green, Grass of Home.  For her, Pontypridd is more like Philip Larkin’s provincial town, which he categorised as ‘intensely sad’.   But she has to revisit it to remind herself why she left it.  She has to formally break up with her best friend and her cousin and absorb some of her mother’s homespun, fridge magnet wisdom.  She needs to listen to the tape her aunt once made of her talking in public to remember herself as a little girl.  She has to endure the community’s (imagined) scorn at her failure to make much of herself in London.

So, despite my initial reluctance, I began to sympathise with a character like too many young people today who, deprived of ideals and opportunities, have neither the education nor the particular talent necessary to make a go of their lives but who still long for something, for anything more.  The fifties had James Dean, the original rebel without a cause, and the sixties had Mick Jagger, who couldn’t get no satisfaction.  The twenty twenties, then, have mixed up Phoebes, out on a limb, wanting something that Katie Payne knows cannot just be put into words.  The presentation of this unidentifiable but deep longing is what got her performance at Theatr Clwyd a standing ovation.

At Theatr Clwyd, the show was followed by a discussion with Katie Payne and Stef O’Driscoll, its director.  A good performance doesn’t need a follow-up but there was an interesting mention of ADHD in it.  Although Phoebe’s behaviour is extreme, the condition doesn’t crop up specifically in the play (unless I missed it).  Skirting the topic means the short story can focus on someone who has good, everyday reasons to be frustrated.  Introducing it would have meant considering Phoebe’s problems from a different perspective and changing its emphasis on the restrictions of small town life.

Simon Kensdale

‘Under Milk Wood’ is a challenge.  It’s tackled regularly in Wales because there are not many plays that focus forensically on everyday Welsh life and, as far as I know, none written poetically.  It is an extraordinary piece of writing, but this makes for a very unconventional play. Dylan Thomas sets the work somewhere that, on the face of it, like so many small towns, has nothing of apparent significance to offer the outside world – bugger all, in fact – but by the sheer pressure of his language transforms it into something remarkable and unforgettable. It’s as if he had followed Keats’ instruction to ‘load every rift with ore’ to the letter.

But that’s the problem.  We are not used to modern-day poetic drama.  Even if Llareggub (or Llaregyb – the production uses the town’s Welsh name) floats somewhere in its own particular mid-twentieth century time zone, the people of the town and their activities are the stuff of common or garden reality, not of fantasy or historical legend.  To hear their everyday conversations and monologues shot through with a welter of idiom, word play jingles, sly metaphors and over-the-top imagery, is quite an experience.  You have to listen carefully and take in what is being said to appreciate what is going on. 

Poetry enriches the moment.  It creates a charged atmosphere, and it builds tension via suggestions and reflections.  Poetic drama does not require much in the way of mystery and suspense, but it can deliver within some very tight rules.  ‘Under Milk Wood’ conforms to some of the classic restrictions.  Its action more or less happens in one place and is described and discussed by two narrators.  Everything takes place in the course of twenty-four hours, one Spring day.  But you have to really go at Thomas’ text to turn it into a play works for a contemporary theatre audience. 

Kate Wasserberg directing and Hayley Grindle designing adopt an approach which changes what Thomas wrote specifically for the radio into what looks like a kind of pop-up adult graphic novel, full of colour, surprise and ingenuity.  All the episodes of a soap are compressed here into a reality show.  The sweeping narration is delivered by all the members of the cast, meaning a variety of voices and accents take us into the heart of an average small community. 

The production is given considerable muscle by performing members of Craidd, a Welsh collective which includes deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists.  Although there are only eleven of them, they create over forty characters.  These characters are necessarily only sketched in but they, in turn, evoke the diversity of a whole community.  Of course, this suggestive process is helped in this by names like Mrs Willy Nilly, Organ Morgan, Evans the Death, Gossamer Benyon, Nogood Boyo and Sinbad Sailors. 

The cast perform the interconnected sketches that build up the circumstances of these characters with energy and wit in an even collaboration, each briefly coming centre stage. No one single performer hogs the limelight because no single story line is given preference.  The only exception to this principle are the stand-out singers, whose solos in the second half add another dimension to the atmosphere.

There is no resolution to the various scenarios, no startling denouement to make a point, no deus ex machina.  We know Miss Myfanwy Price and Mr Mog Edwards will never consummate their affair.  Sinbad dotes on Gossamer Benyon, but she will never gobble him up. For all his plotting, Mr Pugh will never murder Mrs Pugh.  Cherry Owen will continue coming home drunk, as his wife loves him drunk or sober and Butcher Benyon will continue tormenting his sensitive wife who believes his little lies. Mrs Ogmore Pritchard, twice widowed, won’t have a gentleman in from Builth Wells, preferring instead to live with the ghosts of her former husbands.

The only conclusion to what goes on in Llareggub (or Llaregyb) is night falling yet again on a kind of melancholy in which Capt Cat’s Rosie Probert is dead – like Polly Garter’s Little Willie Wee, who took her on his knee.  In the dusk, the words ‘Thou Shalt Not’ speak from the wall while Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age.

Whilst there are frequent references throughout to social issues – ‘There’s a nasty lot live here when you come to think’ – and truisms ‘like Men are brutes on the quiet’ occur regularly, there’s no dramatic argument, no social or political message to get across other than,

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood

Dylan Thomas intended to paint an animated portrait of a place without ever judging it Theatr Clwyd’s production is faithful to his intentions in its own way.  I don’t know how many stars to give it but it’s well worth seeing.

Hi Elise, great to meet you! Can you start by telling our readers about your role at WJEC?

Absolutely! I have been Subject Adviser for Music and Drama since April 2023, but I have recently changed roles. I am now the Subject Officer for Drama at WJEC, and my role is to oversee the running of each of our GCSE and A Level qualifications in England and Wales.

Is Music and Drama something you were interested in from a young age? What led to this current role with the WJEC?

Yes, it was, I have always been involved in theatre in some form. I did Drama and Music at school and then went on to study Music & Musical Theatre at the University of Chichester. After that, I trained to teach as a secondary Drama/Music teacher; after several years teaching I decided to study a master’s in musical Theatre at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and the move to Cardiff for my MA is what led me to WJEC.

Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama

For readers who might not know, what exactly does the WJEC do?

WJEC is the Welsh Joint Education Committee. As Wales’ largest awarding body, at WJEC we provide trusted bilingual qualifications, straight-forward specialist support, and reliable assessment to schools and colleges across the country. With more than 75 years’ experience, we are also amongst the leading providers in both England and Northern Ireland.

When it comes to Drama, how do you go about choosing which plays are selected for study — is there a selection process? Are certain plays more popular than others with teachers?

There is a process we must follow, and this process is informed by our regulators (Ofqual in England and Qualification Wales in Wales). Any update to the specification must be approved by the regulator and the suitability of texts are tested and questioned to ensure each text we choose is right for teachers and learners.

Do you see your work as part of supporting Welsh arts and culture, especially when it comes to studying Welsh writers and creatives?

Absolutely, as the largest exam board in Wales, supporting Welsh culture is at the heart of everything we do. We work hard to ensure that Welsh language, Welsh theatre, and Welsh creatives are represented through our specifications. We do this through running dedicated Welsh medium events, producing all our resources in English and Welsh, promoting Welsh playwrights and composers through our specifications, and ensuring we have representation from Welsh speakers in our examining teams, senior examiners, and question paper teams (to name but a few of the ways!)

Welsh Playwrights feature in the current WJEC Drama specification. Resting Restless by Bethan Marlow is one of the current WJEC, GCSE, Set Texts. Face to Face by Meic Povey and Lovesong by Abi Morgan are part of the AS/A Level Set Texts, how is the Welsh work chosen, are the writers or their Estates involved in anyway?

Our Principal Examiners work with the Subject Officer to choose a selection of texts suitable for examination, and we must seek permission from the writers to use their work.

What’s the part of your job you most enjoy, and why? My favourite parts of the job are working on resources for teachers and attending CPD events.

I love finding an area where teachers need support and creating something to help.

What do you wish more young people knew or understood about WJEC and the work you do?

I think it important to know that everyone working at WJEC, in each subject and each department is a real person; at the end of the phone, an email, working on question papers, marking candidates work is always a human! Also, the subject Officers and Subject Advisers are all teachers, so we have specialist knowledge and specific experience that informs each area of our roles.

Have any recent trends in Drama or Music (like digital theatre, new Welsh writing, rap or experimental music) influenced your thinking about future syllabuses?

Trends and advancements in theatre in Music is certainly something we are considering all the time. For example, in Music we ran a CPD event a couple of years ago that focussed on DJ, Rap, Sequencing and beatboxing as we have seen an increase in learners choosing these paths in their GCSE Music course and we want to ensure we are supporting teachers to facilitate that.

If you could pick one piece of advice for someone aged 18–30 wanting to pursue a creative career in Drama or Music, what would you say?

For creative careers, or ‘industry-based’ careers, my advice is to make your own work. It gives you a portfolio (especially when auditions or freelance work is…sparse!) you find out what you like and which areas you want to put energy into, and you never know who you’ll meet. It is, however, also important to remember there are countless careers that aren’t ‘industry based’ available to you too, where you are still working within your field and working collaboratively and creatively with your peers/colleagues.

Looking ahead — are there any exciting plans or changes at WJEC that you’re buzzing about?

We have just released a new GCSE Drama specification for schools in Wales which is very exciting!