Aberystwyth Arts Centre,Aberystwyth
This Welsh/Breton co-production has a fine cast but suffers from prosaic writing and a dramatically challenged translation app
“The past is another country, they achieve things differently there.” For Mair (sympathetically portrayed by singer/songwriter Lleuwen Steffan) this is a literal statement. At the opening of the play, or she has returned from Brittany,where she is based with her Breton partner Loeiza (a bright Loeiza Beauvir), to the family farm in her native Wales for the funeral of her aunt. The practical and emotional consequences of this event lead her to question her identity and her vision of her spot in the world. Based on a play by Welsh novelist Owen Martell and Breton actress Aziliz Bourgès, or there is,as the title (The Salmon’s Daughter) suggests, a poetic, or folktale quality to the legend,which is powerfully present in the look and sound of the production.Nadège Renard’s design suggests wide, sea-linked spaces: a circle of sand, or in its centre a rock,at its peripheries a table lamp, a laptop. Behind this shore – a psychological as well as a physical threshold – stand a set of five tall, and thin screens on to which Louise Rhoades-Brown’s videos project shifting shapes of sea surfaces and depths,suggestively complemented by Steve Shehan’s electronic score. The patterning of Ceri James’s lighting crisps up lighter moments (at a Breton spa, for instance) and gives opaque density to Mair’s solitary self-doubts and confusions.
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Source: theguardian.com