A Dirty Broth

A Dirty Broth Description

When Caradoc Evans&s play Taffy was first performed in London,the Western Mail reviewer described it as &like a dirty brothwhich, dished out to the English people, is swallowed withavidity.& In so doing, it summed up the treatment often givento the tradition of English-language playwriting in Wales &sometimes ignored, sometimes disapproved of, rarely celebrated.This anthology, the first in a series of three, brings together threeplays from the beginnings of Welsh playwriting in English; Changeby J. O. Francis (1913), a family drama of the upheavals at the startof the twentieth century, Taffy (1923), a fierce satire on the Welshsocial and religious establishment, and A Comedy of Good andEvil (1924) by Richard Hughes, a magical realist fantasy of thedilemmas faced by a country cleric and his wife when they are facedwith a literal demon-child.Edited by David Cottis, who also co-wrote the introduction withAlyce von Rothkirch, this volume shows the earliest stirringsof the English-language theatre in Wales, and the first ofmany attempts to set up a Welsh National Theatre. It sees thebeginnings of the preoccupations and subject matter that wereto characterise Welsh playwriting throughout the twentiethcentury, and to influence later writers such as Emlyn Williams,Dylan Thomas, Diana Morgan, and Jack Jones.