I must admit to a sense of eager anticipation whenever a new play by Ian Rowlands appears on stage or page. Witnessing one of his plays is not generally a comfortable experience, but he can be relied upon to provoke three things: laughter, thought and, more often than not, anger. Rowlands does not disappoint with his latest, Blink.It is not new ground, but his subject is always worth reconsideration. Blink is firmly located in the town of Porth, a community with which Rowlands seems to identify. From the mastery of his dramatic language, it is obvious that the inherited modulation, mindset and morality of the Valleys are part of his DNA. Here he returns to a study of the Valleys’ male and, through carefully assembled Rhondda cadences, he unmasks the sterility of a persona constructed by hardship to exclude an effective emotional language. This is symbolized by the inert and hospital bed-ridden figure of Brian, who has dominated his family until silenced by an illness, which we take to be a stroke, and at the end of the play eternally by his son in the final blink of a machine that has been keeping him alive. He is a metaphor for the emotional constipation that poisons the family, creating a bequest of lies, violence, destruction and disgust, where affection is for children only and friendship is the natural site for abuse. The climatic point of the play comes when his son Si’s search for an admirable father figure finds a much respected drama teacher who, he then finds, uses his position of trust to prey sexually on his students. In the blink of an eye so much is lost. Yet situated at the central point of the play, the revelation of the boy’s exploitation is an extreme expression of a pattern of behaviour that must be played out to the final curtain. All dreams and ambitions are suffocated early on. ‘Valley’s expectations,’ as the Mam character says, ‘that way you don’t get disappointed.’The dramatic structure of the play supports the cyclical nature of the content. Memories are held in common, phrases shared that tie the characters together. Somewhere over the border different opportunities may exist, but here there is no choice. The world of Blink is shaped by an exploitative past not by aspirations for the future. The short episodic nature of the play reminded me of those picture frames crammed with photographs that are often given as presents to mark a special event. Silent images caught in the blink of a camera eye, ‘a few poxy moments out of a whole life’ as Si remarks, moments that have the power to shape experience. Blink is bleak and uncompromising territory where optimism is crushed by the day-to-day experiences of alienation and loneliness. Si accepts his fate with passivity and, though he declares his intention to leave his home town, we know he will carry it with him always.
