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Secrets and lies … Caryl Hughes and Gwion Thomas as the ageing couple in Y Tŵr.
Secrets and lies … Caryl Hughes and Gwion Thomas as the ageing couple in Y Tŵr. Photograph: Clive Barda/Music Theatre Wales
Secrets and lies … Caryl Hughes and Gwion Thomas as the ageing couple in Y Tŵr. Photograph: Clive Barda/Music Theatre Wales

Y Tŵr review – Welsh-language opera traces marriage's highs and lows

This article is more than 6 years old

Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
In a landmark commission for Music Theatre Wales, Guto Puw’s expressive adaptation of a Gwenlyn Parry play poignantly charts a couple’s dreams and disappointments

From youth to old age, from hope to disillusionment, Guto Puw’s new piece for Music Theatre Wales traces the ritual passage through life of a man and woman. Never named, they are anyone and everyone: here is the predicament of the human condition.

Y Tŵr – the title meaning The Tower, and pronounced much as the French “tour” – represents the different levels to which the characters accede one by one. Gwyneth Glyn’s libretto is based on the 1978 play by Gwenlyn Parry, the Caernarfonshire-born dramatist who bridged the gap between Welsh language plays of the past and absurdist writers. Glyn, herself a poet and musician alert to the need for words to be singable, has been respectful to Parry’s original but, in the process, has also created elisions and collisions of events that can make for clunky transitions. Both the banalities of language – references stuck in the 70s – and moments of humour weigh down rather than leaven things, undermining the marriage of drama and music in much the same way as the couple’s union is marred by secrets and lies they promised would never happen.

Nevertheless the fundamental notion of the transience of life, like sand slipping through the fingers, is always present and reflected in Puw’s score where movement and mood, however fleeting, are handled with much assurance. The music is at its most expressive in those reflective passages where dreams are shared, and memories cherished more in retrospect than when they happened. Baritone Gwion Thomas and mezzo Caryl Hughes memorably embrace the travails of the couple, though it is harder for the older Thomas to be credible as the young man, and what ought to be the sexual chemistry of the relationship isn’t really present. But, vocally, they carry the roles with much conviction, and conductor Richard Baker drives the performance on.

Young love … Thomas and Hughes sing with conviction in Y Tŵr, the new opera by Guto Puw. Photograph: Clive Barda/Music Theatre Wales

Samal Blak’s design features a ladder to represent the steps of the tower – that half of it is finally lifted away adds to the ambiguity of the ending, and the set, with all the props laid out around, pays homage to the 17th-century Flemish and Dutch vanitas still-life paintings that attested to the worthlessness of worldly goods. Director Michael McCarthy also has his characters change costume and adjust their makeup on stage by way of highlighting the theatricality of the exercise. Such devices ought to have added to the experience but, again, somehow detracted from the score whose integrity is unquestionably the strongest element of the whole.

As the first contemporary operatic work written in the Welsh language – though this is very much the dialect of a village at the foot of the Carneddau – it breaks important new ground, as does the collaboration with Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and the Vale of Glamorgan festival.

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