Skip to main content

The Wind of Heaven review – a bewitching tale of faith and guilt

Finborough, London
A Welsh teenager is hailed as the second coming in this fascinating revival of Emlyn Williams’ long-forgotten play

This enterprising theatre struck gold in 2011 with its revival of Emlyn Williams’s Accolade. They now turn to an earlier Williams work, unseen since its London premiere in 1945, that deals with an outbreak of religious fervour in a Welsh mountain village just after the Crimean war. It’s a weird piece, chiefly fascinating today for what it reveals about Williams himself.

He originally played the pivotal figure of Ambrose Ellis, a renegade Welshman who owns a circus in Birmingham and is drawn back to his birthplace by rumours of magic and music in the air. He discovers that a 13-year-old boy is believed to have miraculous powers, which include curing a cholera epidemic, and is thought to be the new Christ. Having arrived as an exploitative businessman, Ellis turns into a dedicated evangelist. Although Williams never explains the credulity of the villagers, the play is intriguing as an exploration of his own guilt: you feel that Williams, who as a successful actor and writer became part of the showbiz world, is expressing his own nostalgia for the Welsh landscape and language, and conceivably his search for a lost faith.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/33yvLVw
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more