James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
Iphigenia in Splott (Modern Plays, 8)
A one-woman play that overlays Greek tragedy with the pressures of austerity through the life of a young woman, Effie.
Work Information
An ancient myth reappears as the pain of one young woman in a contemporary city.
Gary Owen’s monodrama follows Effie as social pressure and private choice collide in a sharply drawn portrait of working-class life.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
- Published
- 2022-06-30
- Pages
- 80 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.95 x 1.14 x 19.56 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781350298866
- ISBN-10
- 1350298867
- Price
- 3547 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Drama/British & Irish
'What gets me through is knowing I took this pain, and saved all of you from suffering the same.' Stumbling down Clifton Street at 11:30 a.m. drunk, Effie is the kind of girl you'd avoid eye contact with, silently passing judgement. We think we know her, but we don't know the half of it. Effie's life spirals through a mess of drink, drugs and drama every night,and a hangover worse than death the next day - till one night gives her the chance to be something more. This powerful new adaptation of the enduring Greek myth drives home the high price people pay for society's shortcomings. Winner of Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards 2015
Welsh playwright Gary Owen is a past winner of the Meyer Whitworth, George Devine and Pearson best play awards. In June 2015 he made his Royal Court debut with Violence and Son. His other plays include Love Steals Us from Loneliness, Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco, The Shadow of a Boy, The Drowned World (winner Fringe first), Ghost City, Cancer Time, SK8, Big Hopes, In the Pipeline, Blackthorn, Mary Twice, Amgen, Broken, Bulletproof, The Ugly Truth and Free Folk. His adaptations include Spring Awakening and Ring, Ring, a new version of La Ronde for the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Dicken's A Christmas Carol for Sherman Cymru. He is a Creative Associate at Watford Palace Theatre, where his plays We that Are Left, Mrs Reynolds and the Ruffian, and Perfect Match have been produced.
Reviews
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This is a new play by Gary Owen, performed for the first time in May 2015, and is a monologue by Effie (Iphigenia, obviously) and featuring, as one of the characters in the tale she tells, a lad called Lee (Achilles) discharged from the army having lost the lower part of one leg to an IED. The parallels stop there, however. This is not a modern retelling of the story of Iphigenia. Effie is not an innocent princess. She spends her life getting drunk and having sex, and fighting her way through hangovers, and being aggressive in every encounter. Dare to tell her to mind her language and she’ll lay into you verbally; threaten her with the police and she’ll threaten the safety of your children. She has a nothing life with nothing and no one to live for. The perfect sacrifice. But as she gains motivation to change her life, and as we gain hope for her future, we, like Agamemnon, are torn between the desire to see her sacrificed and the desire to see her treated as any human being should be. As a book, the play is an easy and entertaining read, and also thought-provoking. The story of Iphigenia is a very important one for me and I worried at times while reading Iphigenia in Splott that the title was not doing justice to the brilliance of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, but the ending laid my misgivings to rest.
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I saw this play performed and the girl was exceptional. I’m not always the best at reading plays, I prefer to see them but reading this one allows you see really appreciate the writing. It’s so wonderful and hugely relevent.
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Gritty, raw, revolts my and exactly what I wanted, Gary Owen is a genius of the people and of working class Britain
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Great play. I found the end slightly disappointing, slightly too much polemic for me but Iphigenia is a believable character and the monologue doesn't lose pace at all.
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