Writer: Emlyn Williams
Director: Dominic Cooke
Emlyn Williams’ semi-autobiographical play hasn’t been seen in London for 35 years, and frankly that’s a surprise because it’s an interesting comedy of manners and it has at least two strong roles for female actors. In Dominic Cooke’s revival, The Corn is Green is given a layer of self-reflexivity so that the playwright becomes character in his own play. It’s a strategy that eventually works.
But at first having Williams announce all the stage directions feels like a cumbersome technique and is quite distracting in the opening act, which introduces all the major players. He presents to us Miss Ronberry, an unmarried woman who is preparing a house for its new tenant coming to the Welsh mining village from London. Without a husband Miss Ronberry occupies a kind of limbo, though she hasn’t given up on her hopes for a husband. Also trapped in a kind of no-man’s land is solicitor’s clerk Mr Jones, a working-class man with a grammar school education, which means he doesn’t fit in with the rest of the men in the village who walk ten miles each day to work in the coal mines.
When Miss Moffat arrives with big plans to teach the miners how to read and write, she quickly recruits Miss Ronberry and Mr Jones as teachers in her makeshift school. She persuades them that teaching will make up for their other disappointments. Miss Moffat likes a challenge and brings with her a Sally Ann maid who was once a thief and the maid’s grumpy daughter, Bessie. The set up is straight out of Bernard Shaw.
Handing out their roles, Williams puts characters in their places, and explains their emotions. Slowly, a play begins to form around him, and ULTZ’s set gradually transforms from bare stage to a drawing room full of desks. Despite protestations from the local squire, coal mine owners and even the public houses which worry that they will lose customers, Miss Moffat’s school is well-attended by the miners, still covered in coal dust. But one particular miner writing with a poetic flourish is given special treatment.
In this Pygmalion story, we learn next to nothing about Miss Moffat’s protégé, Morgan Evans. Played by Iwan Davies, Morgan remains a blank page. Instead, Nicola Walker’s Miss Moffat always takes centre stage, and Walker is brusque, but charming, committed but flawed. Miss Moffat knows how to play the system, but we never know what drives her to such altruism. Walker only gives us the faintest hint that sexual desire may behind the championing of her student.
Rising star, Saffron Coomber is Bessie and she does well to chart a journey from childhood to womanhood, and Bessie’s phlegmatic approach to life exposes Miss Moffat’s own misogyny and classism. Alice Orr-Ewing is especially sweet as the innocent Miss Ronberry, and smoothly negotiates her scenes ranging from pathos to humour. Conducting from the side, Gareth David-Lloyd is Emyln Williams, and with a wry smile here and a pained wince there, he’s able to fill in the blank spaces when it comes to Morgan. Frustratingly, the actors have to shout over the miners who appear to burst into song at the business end of each scene; another unnecessary distraction.
First performed in 1938 and coming only a year after A. J. Cronin’s novel, The Citadel, which linked coalminers’ illnesses to the inhalation of coal dust, The Corn is Green is much funnier than expected. But that’s perhaps because we learn little about working in a coal mine. Instead, Williams’ play is concerned with the problems of social mobility, and what happens when life gets in the way. It’s a nature/nurture story, but, in Cooke’s production, told in the most sophisticated way.
Runs until 11 June 202
