IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT

By Diana Simmonds

March 10 2025

IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT, New Ghosts Theatre Company at the Old Fitz, 7-22 March 2025. Photography by Phil Erbacher

Written in 2015, Gary Owen’s one-woman suburban epic Iphigenia in Splott is one of the most remarkable plays of the past decade. First staged in Sydney at Flight Path in 2020, against all odds and likelihood, the same creative team has reassembled to remount the production at the Old Fitz. For those who saw it in 2020, here’s a rare chance to revisit. For those who didn’t, there is the thrill and shock of experiencing it for the first time.

What’s hard to believe – unless you have Welsh connections – is that Splott exists. It was once farmland and is now a post-industrial suburb of Cardiff. According to the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (2014), Splott is among the most deprived areas of Wales. Among its persons of note are Gary Owens and Dame Shirley Bassey – also a rugby league player and a BBC Radio 2 traffic reporter.

From the beginning, a sense of urban impoverishment and displacement is made tangible by Angela Doherty’s set of skewed concrete slabs that might be a demolition site or any low-rent venue. Luna Ng’s richly varied lighting schemes suggest the glare of high street fluoro, the garish colours of bars and pubs, or the single low watt globe of a grotty flat. A significant presence – occasionally almost a second character – is Chrysoulla Markoulli’s music and sound design. Although she is alone on stage, Meg Clarke as Effie, is strongly supported by all these elements.

Clarke is also buoyed up and carried along by Owens’s writing. It’s of the highest calibre and is vivid, violent, poetic and scalding; and her performance, directed by Lucy Clements, is one of sustained, intense brilliance. It begins in a frightening display of impotent rage as unemployed, bored, feckless Effie talks us through a typical day. If you met her on the street you’d cross over; if you saw her in the op shop, it would be wise to avert your eyes from her pilfering. Inadvertently she self-describes as a slag and a skank.

She is at once terrifying and piteous because she’s also describing herself as an overlooked, unimportant part of a country where the bloated rich have further enriched themselves while the poor have been ground into the rubble of a deconstructed society. Effie isn’t alone in this picture: she also conjures, with a vocal inflection or raised shoulder, her thuggish boyfriend, or a fat cow with an overloaded stroller of snotty brats, or a bone-weary medical receptionist, and her own grandmother whose Welsh vigour has withstood decades of menial work and disappointment.

As already said, but can’t be overstated, it’s a brilliant performance. And the audience is skewered, unmoving, to the benches as Effie is sacrificed like her namesake, but not to the mythical gods of ancient Greece. Effie and millions like her were and are on the altar of the modern god of rampant, unchecked Mammon. Until she spots and is spotted across a crowded club by Lee, an ex-soldier with more secrets than the crutches revealed when she tries to get him to dance.

All the while Effie prowls the levels and perimeters of the stage, engaging nervous patrons with a bit of sass or an out and out threat. She is heartbreaking, chilling and outrageously funny by turn. Where she goes and where she drags us by the end of 90 enthralling minutes is moving in ways that shock, and stir and enlighten. We are guided through the horrors of the three-day hangover – which at least takes care of half the week – to the real tragedies of being at the bottom of the heap, where budget cuts mean insufficient midwives, ill-equipped ambulances, and bureaucratic indifference. (None of which can be dismissed in increasingly greed-dominated Australia.)

Iphigenia in Splott is playwriting at its sharpest and most spellbinding. In this production, with Clements and Clarke, it’s difficult to imagine it being better served. Effie and her world are spectacularly terrifying and all too believable. You’ll laugh, you’ll ache, then you’ll cry. Recommended without reservation.