The visceral one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott by Welsh dramatist Gary Owen has overwhelmed audiences and critics since it premiered in 2015, reimagining the sacrificial heroine Iphigenia from Greek tragedy as a young working-class woman in Cardiff who likes a drink and a laugh, defiant in the face of pity, condescension and curtain-twitching. Now it has been recreated as a blistering Welsh-language movie by director Marc Evans, who has co-written the screenplay with Owen, with a live-wire performance from Leisa Gwenllian as Effi, a child of austerity and the Covid lockdown, reclaiming her rights to immediate pleasure and happiness in the face of long-term deprivation.
At times it plays a little broad with the occasional touch of Holby City; and on a factual point, if Effi’s solicitor wanted to dissuade her from abandoning her lucrative negligence case against a hospital, he would emphasise that her payout would come from the hospital’s insurance (though, yes, the resulting increased premiums would punish future patients). Still, Effi o Blaenau is part of a British social realist tradition that extends from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow to Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, and it turns on that kitchen-sink staple no longer often found in modern drama and movies: the unplanned pregnancy. It also has what social realism often doesn’t have: an absorbing, propulsive story that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And it’s a film that doesn’t flinch from the burden of tragedy.
