Iphigenia in Splott - Redux

Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre first presented Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott in June-July 2021 to great acclaim: audiences were overwhelmed, and there were three much deserved Green Room Awards: Performance, Direction and Design.  In 2024, Red Stitch brings back this funny, visceral, confronting monologue with the same team: Jessica Clarke as ‘Effie’, director Gary Abrahams, and designers Jacob Battista & Sophie Woodward.  Here is Stage Whispers 2021 review (redux) with a few tweaks and amendments…

What Iphigenia in Splott does is tell a gripping story – with a sting in the tail.  If you have seen the play before, you know what that sting is, but the story remains just as gripping because it is told by Jessica Clarke.  Alone on stage for close to ninety minutes - and with a Welsh accent too - she gives us a brilliant performance, by turns in-your-face, proud, shocking, whimsical, childlike, outraged, wounded, and deeply moving. 

Lounging upstage, Clarke’s character ‘Effie’ is waiting, waiting, in a bland, austerity government waiting room (design by Jacob Battista and Sophie Woodward) – a limbo of ugly colours, mismatched furniture and unforgiving light (design Rachel Burke).  Then, as if she has just noticed our presence, she comes right downstage to confront and challenge us.  She knows what we think: ‘Effie’ is a ‘nasty skank’.  She knows that’s how we, the audience, respectable folks, see her, but for her, it’s almost a badge of defiant pride.  Yeah, sure, her life is a round – or a grind - of drugs and alcohol and sex.  So what? 

A bloke she knows shows up with some high class weed, and then they’re high and they’re fucking all afternoon…  Her telling is as matter of fact as that. 

But Effie will win us over – thanks to Clarke’s portrayal and Gary Owen’s text and director Gary Abraham’s drawing out of the emotions under the text.  Effie might take us in with her cheek and defiance, and her sticking it up the self-righteous, the hypocritical, and the judgemental – delivered with a gorgeous smile - underneath that cheek and defiance we sense a desperate loneliness, a self-loathing, a smart and tough woman already at a dead end. 

We might withdraw from Effie, but we don’t because she’s funny and caustically observant, and so we’re laughing and feeling sad for her at the same time.  And then, as she tells it, a bit amazed at herself, her story moves to unexpected, touching love and hope… to bitter disappointment… to rage…

Director Gary Abrahams imbues the telling with expressive physicality on the confined Red Stitch stage, ringing the story’s changes, its light and shade, in movement and stillness, so that we are swept along with Effie’s tale, carried from a joke to wonder to tenderness and back again. 

Clarke has us leaning forward, finding we care about this ‘nasty skank’, hanging on her every word.  It becomes – to employ an overused term – a visceral experience.  At the end, audience hearts are pounding; they are wrung out, shaking.  Women identify with Effie; men are enraged for her.  Effie’s personal story is so emotionally powerful that it almost overwhelms the political point Gary Owen makes with this story.

The powerful political point is why the play is called Iphigenia in Splott.  Splott is a ‘disadvantaged area’ of Cardiff.  Iphigenia, in classical mythology, was the daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed to the goddess Artemis so that the Greek fleet could sail and lay siege to Troy.  So, Effie’s story is, in its way, an allegory, a woman sacrificed to male purpose and ambition.  It is set in the streets of Splott where the British government’s utter policy failure of ‘austerity’ sacrifices people like Effie.  Her personal story reveals to her (and us) its context.  In Splott, a microcosm of Britain of course, there are cuts to the NHS, to local councils, municipal pools are gone, libraries closed, half the shops empty.  The murder of Iphigenia had, in the end, the horrific consequences of revenge.  And Effie wonders – and so do we – when revenge might come.

Michael Brindley