‘It feels even more urgent now,” says actor Sophie Melville of Iphigenia in Splott, the one-woman play she first starred in back in 2015. “More urgent for me and for the UK. It’s a story that people really, really need to hear.”
The story of Iphigenia – the daughter of the Greek general Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, who was sacrificed to the gods – is transplanted by Welsh playwright Gary Owen to Splott, a deprived area of Cardiff. A damning account of a country gutted by austerity, it takes the form of a monologue narrated by Effie, a gobby young woman who sneers and scoffs at the audience only to break in front of us. The play is brutally effective in depicting the human cost of the cuts and closures, ending on a note of accusatory fury.
