‘Collective temporal distortions’: Queering Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd

In 1957, the Welsh nationalist political party Plaid Cymru, published a science fiction novel. Still the only SF novel in the Welsh-language literary canon, Islwyn Ffowc Elis’ Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd [1] (A Week in Future Wales) charts two journeys taken by the protagonist, Ifan Powell, from Wales of 1957 to Wales of 2033. The first to a socialist utopia where Welsh language and culture have flourished as the result of policies such as those espoused by Plaid Cymru; the second to an alternate fascist dystopia where all things Welsh have long been subsumed into ‘Western England’.

As a political manifesto presented in the form of popular genre fiction, the novel’s narrative often digresses into elaborate and detailed descriptions of governmental policy as Ifan journeys throughout the future Wales. Among the various industries and institutions that he visits is the main playhouse of the bilingual National Theatre, where he witnesses the performance of a new and unnamed (but reassuringly ‘traditional’) naturalistic play. Ifan’s relationship with Mair Llywarch, an actress with the company, is the basis of the novel’s pivotal romantic subplot.

Responding to Dolan’s description of how theatre offers ‘brief enactments of the possibilities of a process that starts now, in this moment of the theatre’ [2] this paper will consider how specifically the theatre, as envisioned in the novel, invited both as literary metaphor and performative practice an opportunity to collectively imagine a future utopic state.

However, elaborating on what I perceive to be that vision’s implicit privileging of normative time [3] it will also consider the manner in which such assumptions have also been prominent in the construction of Welsh-language theatre historiography and its limited dramatic canon. It will propose that such normative theatrical imaginings are insufficient, and instead consider the queer performative potential offered by ‘step[ping] out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.’ [4]

1  Islwyn Ffowc Elis, Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd  (Cardiff: Plaid Cymru, 1957).
2  Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre  (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2005), p.17.
3  Judith (Jack) Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives  (New York; London:
New York University Press, 2005), p.5.
4 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York; London: New York University Press, 2009), p.185.

Gareth is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University. He also reviews theatre for The Guardian.