The dust had barely settled on Wolverhampton Literature Festival, but the creative energy in the city wasn’t ready to dim just yet. This past Tuesday, February 10th, we hosted another Arena Nights. If the Literature Festival was the feast, Arena Nights was the perfect digestif.
The night opened with three performers taking the stage to test their mettle (and their memory) by performing works-in-progress. We heard of a better world, a story which was not about a stone and Red Emma.
Before the interval, we were treated to a 10-minute snippet of An Evening With Gareth Evans, a work-in-progress by Kerry Frater. Though we only saw two of the nine intended scenes, the impact was immediate.
The play introduces us to Wales’ first movie star, Gareth Evans. A man who feels profoundly out of place as he navigates a world that doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Kerri’s writing hints at a character layered with secrets, leaving the audience with a desperate need to see the full picture. You could tell a performance was successful when half the audience spent the interval Googling “Gareth Evans.” The intrigue is officially sparked.
The second half belonged to Maya Catherine Foster and her stellar piece, Lullabies and Love Stories.
This is theatre at its most evocative. Foster deconstructs the treatment of female characters in traditional folklore, weaving together storytelling and song with a linguistic richness that is rare to find. While the tone is often dark, the “well-placed splashes of humour” prevented the weight from becoming overbearing, instead making the sharper edges of the stories cut even deeper.
In a world of “heroic” narratives that often leave women in the margins, Foster’s work feels like a necessary reclamation. “I care for girls that heroes will discard.” Foster proclaims at one point. And shouldn’t we all.
