The Persians

The Persians (Image Toby Farrow)

TFTS  staff involved in National Theatres Wales’ ‘superb production’ (The Guardian) of Aeschlyus’The Persians

Mike Pearson, Simon Banham and Mike Brookes, three core members of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystywth University (TFTS), have all played pivotal roles in an extraordinary performance of The Persians staged at the military training village at Mynydd Epynt in the Brecon Beacons in August 2010. The production, the flagship show in National Theatre Wales’ (NTW) inaugural season of new work, was inspired by Professor Pearson’s involvement in an AHRC Landscape and Environment network grant in 2006-8 that used the site at Epynt for one of its case studies.

In Pearson’s theatrical response to the site two years on, Aeschlyus’ text, the oldest recorded script in western drama, is used to create a complex weave of meanings that collapse simple distinctions between past and present and here and there. It is a testament to Pearson’s skill as a maker of site-based performance that the play, despite its setting, is not used to comment in any obvious sense on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, this version of The Persians is possibly best seen as a continuation of Pearson’s project with the influential Welsh-language company Brith Gof in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently in his collaboration with Mike Brookes. In that work, characterised by what might be called ‘an archaeology of destruction’, Pearson has been concerned to take the temper of the times in Wales. As the communities of Wales confront, yet again, the realities of governmental cuts, Pearson’s The Persians offers a bleak vision of nationhood.

And yet it is precisely the bleakness of Pearson’s production that permits The Persians to become, by some distance, the most important and pertinent play in NTW’s season to date. Lest there be any doubt, the unanimous critical acclaim that has greeted The Persians in the UK national press underlines, yet again, the extent to which practice-based research in TFTS continues to make a significant cultural and creative impact on twenty-first Wales.

Review by Dr Carl Lavery.

Read some of the reviews that have been published:

The Daily Telegraph 13 August

The Guardian 14 August

The Guradian 16 August

AU158/10

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