Ed Thomas, now in his forties, is one of the most distinguished dramatists in Wales today. Since 1988 he has written nine plays, three of which appear in this book: 'Song from a Forgotten City', 'House of America' and 'Gas Station Angel'. The first of these was warmly acclaimed when it was premiered at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff in 1995 and went on to the Royal Court Thetare in London. The second, a film, was shown at BAFTA Piccadilly in 1996 and later at the Sundance Festival in Utah, with Siân Phillips, Matthew Rhys, Donna Edwards and Lisa Palfrey playing memorable parts.These plays are now classics of recent Welsh writing for stage and screen and it is good to have them in book form because they deserve to be read, studied and thought about. They are meant to upset us and make us challenge received wisdom about Wales and the Welsh, especially in these post-industrial times. Their characters are, for the most part, deracinated from their own communities and overwhelmed by American culture in all its compelling vulgarity with disastrous reults on their own identities.In 'House of America', the Lewis family are trapped in their own home, fired by dreams of escape to the USA but incapable of moving. The mother is mad and murderous, the house is undermined by opencast mining, and the unemployed children act out their frustrations in demotic language of rare imagainative force.'Song from a Forgotten City' mixes black humour with acute cultural comment and explores male identity in a city not a million miles from Cardiff, run down and hopelessly grappling with its own cultural problems.Stage directions have been kept to a minimum which, curiously, helps a reading of these texts and invites the reader to enter the world depicted by these plays. Each is followed by an interview with the author carried out by David Adams, Marc Evans and Jeni Williams, all of which I found helpful and illuminating.Even so, these plays are meant to be performed and I cant imagine that many will want to buy them as a book, which begs the question, of course, of why Parthian has brought them out in the first place.
