by Emlyn Williams
seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 23 April 2022
Dominic Cooke directs this revival of Emlyn Williams's semi-autobiographical play The Corn is Green, first staged in the West End in 1938. Nicola Walker plays Miss Moffat, the inspirational schoolteacher who blasts her way like a whirlwind into the stratified society of a Welsh mining village and sees enormous promise in Morgan Evans, one of the miner's sons, played by Iwan Davies.
In a startling move Cooke and his designer ULTZ have imagined the play being created on a bare stage in front of our eyes, as if in the mind of Williams himself (Gareth David-Lloyd) who recites the detailed description of the set so typical of the play texts of the time, and then narrates the entrances and exits, the taking of cups of tea and setting out of lesson books, and so forth, with accompanying sound effects. At first this seems distracting and over-clever, but gradually the idea comes to be a brilliant way of showing the recollection and re-shaping of precious memories in action. It is therefore even more startling to find, after the interval, that the room so painstakingly described in words at the beginning has been given a physical manifestation on stage, in keeping with all those 'drawing room comedies' of its time.
Nicola Walker is excellent as Miss Moffat, inhabiting a character who brings all the force of her personality and convictions to bear on a society that expects women of her class to do nothing if they do not marry and produce children. Even on a cavernous stage with bare concrete walls she dominates and controls, blithely unaware of the way she rides roughshod over the personal cost to her star pupil, or the feelings of other lesser beings. Inevitably Morgan rebels, and the social pressures of the time are set to trap him: the energy of the play and of this production almost distract us from the somewhat distasteful moral dilemma posed and the extremely arbitrary solution adopted to 'save' him.
The play remains a powerful expression of gratitude to a life-changing event in a young boy's life, and the intense conviction that a sharp mind will flourish with education shines through the circumstances that tie the story to a particular time and place. The whole thing was a joy to watch.
