Dedwydd Jones

Four Plays from Wales Ancient and Modern Dedwydd Jones

Plays Ancient and Modern move from the eighteenth century to the present day, Bard is the story of the ?Welsh Shakespeare,? Thomas Edwards, aka Twm O?r Nant, a brick-layer, furnace-builder, bankrupt and write of ?Interludes,? an early form of play. Twm robustly attacked the corruption of the day but his attacks were ignored by the authorities and the academics, for Twm wrote exclusively in Welsh. Bard puts Wales?s own ?Shakespeare? on stage for the first time. A second rebel of the time was one Edward Williams, aka ?Iolo,? a stone-mason, and, like Twm, a supporter of the French and American revolutions. Iolo was one of the finest scholars of the age, and one of the greatest literary forgers of history too! He tricked generations of Welsh academics and is not forgiven even to this day. The ?modern? play, Greed, examines contemporary corporation and utility ?fat kats,? looking into the nature of greed itself. The second play Those Fields of Yellow? traces the course one the most frightful of modern witch hunts, the anti-child abuse hysteria which broke out in the States and then traveled to the UK. This led to the formation of the False Memory Syndrome Society, an effort to defend parents and relations from the wrongful accusations of their own children. This play charters the course of one family and how they deal with the pressures of such accusations.