What goes up must come down. Gravity, light, and the endless construction of luxury flats are the inevitable forces that seem to shape the absurdism of Idle, They Yammer. Written by Matthew Trevannion, this astute and richly textured play is the final production to be staged by Cardiff pub theatre the Other Room at the site it has occupied since 2014.
Perhaps echoing Gwenlyn Parry’s canonical Welsh play Y Tŵr but written for an age of permacrisis, it takes place on a building site atop a seemingly forever unfinished tower. Here, Len and Pritchard, king and queen, labour their days, building brick by brick ever higher into the clouds as crowds amass down below and rivers burst their banks.
Taking delight in language, Trevannion’s script is full of evocative and poetically nimble lines, brimming with playful conceits and imagery. The detailed evocation of a full life lived in a coma; nomadic mothers who acquire linguistic fluency from packaging (“She caught German off a bottle of suntan lotion once”); and corpses who have direct lines to unscrupulous HR departments: these feel like conceits for entire plays but here they dazzle briefly before we’re on to the next metaphysical proposition.
There are instances when the richness of the ideas and absurdist turns threatens to unmoor the drama. But such precariousness is carefully traversed by director Dan Jones and by two fine central performances. As Len and Pritchard, Rhys Parry Jones and Lowri Jenkins give delicately nuanced portrayals; violent, tender and strange.
When it was first announced that the Other Room would have to vacate its current site, many of the headlines noted that it would be replaced by Wales’s tallest building. What is most beguiling about Idle, They Yammer is that it resists the urge to be a didactic metaphor for the continuous churn of central Cardiff. Instead it blossoms into something far more elegiac and affecting: a testament to the compulsion to keep building, even as the world falls apart, and to carving out spaces in the dark where stories continue to be told, and told again.
• At the Other Room, Cardiff, until 21 May
