ALL THAT I AM (Richard Burton Company/Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama)****

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.rwcmd.ac.uk/events/all-i-am 

Available until: 23^rd April 2021

Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama have been producing some fascinating plays recently. Yen and In the Blood in March and now The Writer and All That I Am. I’m really looking forward to seeing Everybody tomorrow. It really could be about anything.

The play choices are interesting because they all make you think. About society. About art. All That I Am makes you think about society too. The ways in which people relate to each other. The extent to which people can know each other – and the many different sides of each person. And what happens when you lose someone. A lot of these plays also show people doing things which are undeniably wrong, but they make it impossible for you to simply dismiss the characters as bad people. The characters and the situations are far too complicated for that.

Another feature of all the RWCMD plays is that they provide incredible challenges for young actors. The characterisation, the challenging scenes and emotions… the roles are really demanding, but they give the students the opportunity to show so much of their talents and I’m yet to see a student who hasn’t risen to the challenge impressively.

Dafydd James’ play is about a group of people who were at school together. Many years after they leave, they discover that someone they knew from school has died and they meet up. Some of them are still in touch. Vix and Rob are having a baby. Sebastien and Rosie are siblings. Some of the others still hang out. A lot of things have changed, but maybe they haven’t all changed as much as they think.

It’s a very interesting play which examines interesting subjects and the characterisation is great. The characters are very different, but this isn’t just a random selection of distinctive characters that have been put together. When they talk to each other, you can feel that they really were friends.

Director Rupert Hands has kept his characters almost entirely at a distance, spaced out across the stage and rarely leaving their own spot, though split screens are sometimes used to enable the characters to be seen at the same time. There is just one shocking moment where two characters touch and it’s all the more powerful because it hasn’t happened anywhere else. The spacing works in the context of the play because even though there are all these connections and relationships between them, there are some ways in which they are, or at least feel, alone. They all have uncertainties about the friend they’ve lost and the future.

Emily Nelson’s set shows each character on their own raised square platform. There’s enough space to move around, it’s easy to get down if necessary and it’s high enough for characters to sit on them comfortably. It works well because it’s almost like they’re all being shown to us, up where we can see them on their own individual stages and it emphases the metaphorical distances between them because moving from one person’s space to another would be complicated. There’s also a lovely shadow effect on the back wall of the stage.

Callum Hymers plays Titch, at the centre of many of the conversations, perhaps because he talks so much. He behaves horribly, but underneath all that is the impression of someone who is in pain emotionally and experiencing more pain, even as he lashes out at others.

James Wilbraham’s Sebastien struggles with a speed impediment (really convincing and never overdone) and going through his own grief, but also trying to stand up to Titch’s gybes and protect Rosie…  he’s another who is really suffering. It’s easy to see why the others sometimes find Catrin Jones’ Rosie irritating, but there’s a vitality and truth about her which the others lack because they are always trying to hold something back. Erwan Sion is almost funny (more than ‘almost’ would have felt wrong in this play) as the charmingly eccentric and kind Danny. Will Kerr and Katherine Devlin’s complicated relationship as Rob and Vix provides hope in a play that has very little. Nia Gandhi’s Biffa is full of surprises, but she makes them believable.

Another intriguing play from the Richard Burton Company at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.