It is the tip of the varsity week and precociously self-possessed 16-year-old Carys is in detention. Her arms and forearms are bandaged, as each Friday stigmata on her palms start to weep. She claims that her ft too have just lately begun to bleed. A video of this miracle is about to go viral. Her trainer Siân, craving for her personal absolution, threatens to name a disaster crew, and out of doors on the schoolyard, an amassing crowd sings of angels. Indicators are taken for wonders in The Merthyr Stigmatist, Lisa Parry’s taut and stirring two-hander about religion and group in Merthyr Tydfil.
Skilfully paced with route by Emma Callander, it’s a dramatic setup whose stress solely will increase over its working time of little below an hour. The airless and claustrophobic classroom is a microcosm for the world outdoors. All people is aware of everyone else’s enterprise a bit too nicely, and persons are all nonetheless recognized by their occupation: Bryn Books, John the Chippy, Carys Christ (“CC – like Coco Chanel”).
As Carys, Bethan McLean makes a strikingly assured skilled debut. Figuring out and articulate with flashes of indignant and impassioned fury, Carys relishes the miracle at hand. Additionally glorious is Bethan Mary-James as Siân, bristling with nervousness and doubt.
Recorded stay and accessible on-line, it’s a manufacturing that appears to exist within the interregnum between two worlds: between the mundane and the transcendental, and likewise – with face masks and allusions to busy hospitals – between the final 12 months and the rising new regular. There may be some stress too between the theatricality of its staging and digital availability; there are moments I want I may have skilled stay. Its decision additionally comes a bit too rapidly, a bit too neat inside its digital constraints.
However as a result of perceptive sharpness of Parry’s script and the effortlessly affective performances, it’s deeply transferring. Premiering the day after 1000’s of deaths have been decreased to the general public squabble of public schoolboys, a cry of perception and self-determination in Merthyr, after many years of successive catastrophes and indifference, appears like its personal little miracle.