The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.”
One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales. “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on stage is really powerful.”
Four years later, she is starring in a Welsh-language film adaptation of the play, Effi o Blaenau. Funny, lairy and vulnerable, she gives one of those you-saw-her-here-first breakthrough performances. Even when Effi – the final “e” was dropped from her name for the film to conform to Welsh spelling conventions – is yelling at her longsuffering nan, her honesty and open face make it impossible not to root for her. Then, when she becomes pregnant after a big night out in Llandudno, everything changes for Effi. The film is directed by Marc Evans, who co-wrote the script with Owen, changing the location from Cardiff to Blaenau Ffestiniog, a former slate-mining town in north-west Wales.
Over a video-call, Owen says that expectations were not high for Iphigenia in Splott on opening night at the Sherman theatre in Cardiff in 2015: “They only put it on for two and a half weeks and they were quite worried about whether it would sell the tickets.” When he wrote the play, in 2014, he was living in Splott in the thick of the austerity era. “We were being told that we all had to take these cuts because we were all in it together.”
But looking around him in Splott, at people reliant on community centres and Flying Start (the Welsh version of the early-years support scheme Sure Start) to get by, it didn’t feel as if everyone was taking the same hit: “It was really apparent that if you cut public services, the people who were most vulnerable, who depended most on those services, were going to get the worst of it.” Effie was inspired partly by his neighbours across the road, who lived in supported accommodation – “not always the easiest neighbours”, he says, smiling.
His own experience went into the play, too. When his second child was born, Owen’s partner went into labour early – as Effie does. There wasn’t a bed in the special care baby unit in Cardiff, so calls were made to hospitals in Newport and Swansea. None had beds. The nearest was in Abergavenny, an hour’s drive north, but it was snowing and the road often closed in bad weather. The baby is now 13. “But weeks after he was born, I was sitting giving him a bottle and the snow was still on the mountains. He needed to be intubated as soon as he was born. If they had got in trouble, he would likely have died. It was one of those moments of going: oh, this happened because of cuts to services.”
The play he wrote in 2014 still feels horribly relevant – and continues to be staged. What does that say about the state we are in? Owen sighs. “Austerity has become the normality. Services are crumbling and life is just very hard for a lot of people. I don’t think things have got better; I think they’ve got worse.”
Iphigenia in Splott has been translated into French and Spanish. The idea for a Welsh-language film came from the producer Branwen Cennard at S4C, the free-to-air television channel for Welsh speakers. Making the film in Welsh with subtitles was non-negotiable, she says: “I wouldn’t have entertained any other way.”
Why the move from Cardiff, I ask Evans? “Blaenau is a town where people live in Welsh. If you want to get really under the skin of Welsh-language working-class culture, you’ve got to go to the north. That’s where the kids fuck and fight in Welsh, to be slightly crude.” The town’s landscape, surrounded by vast, human-made mountains of slate waste, is also a gift. “Blaenau is amazing, because you just look at it and it says ‘post-industrial’.”
Not that he wanted to direct the film, Evans says. His plan was to hire a female director, step back and take an executive producer credit. “I was very aware of the male-gaze aspect of it.” What happened? “I don’t know, there seems to be a shortage of female directors here in Wales at the moment – in the Welsh language, anyway.” He compensated by hiring female department heads and women in senior roles on the crew, including, crucially, the cinematographer Eira Wyn Jones. “I knew there were certain scenes where it really would be about the lens and Leisa, so I think that levelled things up a little bit.”
When it came to casting, Evans assumed they would have young actors queueing around the block to audition. “The culture of acting is really strong in Wales,” he says. (His last film, Mr Burton, told the story of the young Richard Burton.) But there were fewer than he expected, which he thinks may have been related to the shrinking pool of talent from non-privileged backgrounds. “Acting has become a difficult place if you’re working class or if you haven’t got money to go to college. You’re really chucking your hat in the ring with acting, which is so precarious,” he says.
Gwenllian grew up down the road from Blaenau Ffestiniog. “I don’t think I’d quite realised how Welsh my area is until I moved out. We’d go months without speaking English at all, except on the phone. You can go to my local McDonald’s and order in Welsh. It’s quite a bubble.” In fact, at 12, when a BBC casting director came to her choir looking for a girl to appear in the kids’ show Rocket’s Island, she was nervous about auditioning in English. “I can remember telling my mum: I’m not going to do it, because it’s English. You don’t really start English lessons at school until you’re about seven or eight.”
After Rocket’s Island, Gwenllian landed a part in the long-running Welsh language soap opera Rownd a Rownd: “I did that until I was 19.” The money she had earned from acting paid for drama school: “It opened a lot of doors and opportunities that my mam would not have been able to afford.” When she auditioned for a place at the Oxford School of Drama, she had to read a passage from Iphigenia in Splott. “My acting teacher had introduced me to the play when I was 15 or 16. I connected with it so much.”
It must have felt like fate when she heard that a film was being made on her home turf in north Wales, I say. “Actually, I was hungover in the audition. We’d had a massive session the night before.” In retrospect, this may not have hindered her chances. “It was quite Effi.”
Her performance is the beating heart of the film. She is in practically every scene – and what scenes they are. She downs industrial quantifies of vodka, performs a particularly cringe dance in a nightclub, has sex, gives birth and lives through a terrible tragedy.
Did she have a method for getting into character? “No. I don’t think there’s any secret recipe. I read it a million times and I thought a lot about her and the story. I just thought of her as a real person, because there are loads of real-life Effis out there.” Getting into costume helped, too: “Once I had the lashes on and the eyeliner, I felt like Effi.”
• Effi o Blaenau is released in the UK on 19 June
