Theatr Iolo's The Flock,
Bridgend College
Theatr Iolo director Kevin Lewis had to rush off to Glasgow after this performance
to receive a coveted Tron award for Bison and Sons, voted the best children's show there last year.
That show was a Dutch play, and the latest from this Cardiff young people's theatre company,
The Flock, is another import - an impressive play by young Danish writer Jesper Wamsler translated by Sarah Argent -
both were in the Bridgend College audience - that continues Iolo's policy of contemporary European plays.
So kids are the same in Copenhagen as Cardiff, right?
It would certainly seem so from The Flock, which is a hard-edged tale about a gang of young street girls,
and in particular Louise (Anna Joseph) and Vic (Carri Munn). They live by robbing, hanging around, smoking and generally enjoying themselves.
There's no moral condemnation in the play, though it hardly glorifies their lives, either. Questions of whether we approve or even like the characters are not up for grabs.
But the dangers teenage girls can get themselves into are at the core, as they get exploited and abused by the landlord of the house they're squatting in, while Louise's fate is already assured, since we meet her at the beginning as a ghost.
The story (based on conversations with a girl Jesper met at a railway station) is told in retrospect
by Vic, now 16 we guess, when she makes her regular visit to Louise's grave.
Apart from the mugging and robbery it seems almost innocent and the "flock" of free birds only
disbands because of the intervention of a man from the real world (not for nothing do they nickname him "the fox").
