Petula review

Fabrice Melquiot is one of France’s most prolific playwrights, spawning 60 dramas for an adolescent and post-adolescent audience that are surreal, sometimes gruesome, but always hooked on very truthful angst. Wales’ two national theatres, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and National Theatre Wales, team up with one of the nation’s most subversive companies, August 012, to tackle Melquiot’s weird imagination with Petula.

On paper, it’s a story that could be Roald Dahl or early Spielberg: a 12-year-old boy leaves behind his frankly useless parents and step-parents to search through space for his long-lost cousin. Except this is a story-world in which nothing is remotely conventional. Young Pwdin Evans (played by Dewi Wykes in a superb professional stage debut) is the improbable hero – bookish, sensitive, convinced he’s too fat for the girl of his dreams. 

His stepmother (Rachel Summers), a vampiric figure with a salacious lust for blood (and possibly for Pwdin), has terrified his Dadi (Sion Pritchard) into submission. When Pwdin’s Mami (Clêr Stephens) visits with new husband Joe (Tom Mumford) for the dinner party from hell (duck à l’orange is a live quacking mallard and two whole oranges), Pwdin decides he’s had enough. He sets off to find Petula, his cousin and pre-pubescent crush, lost somewhere among the stars. His space odyssey takes in a close encounter with a flea called Gillian Anderson and a bizarrely funny musical interlude with Ed Sheeran and Beyoncé. If the material isn’t strange enough, the dialogue is a mind-bending combination of Welsh, English and French. This production is nothing if not unique.

This represents the second time director Mathilde López and writer Daf James have translated and tackled Melquiot (after 2016’s Yuri). Melquiot’s storytelling is as amorphous as quicksilver in your hands – and so López and James slap and splat it into something funny, grotesque and moving. It’s an extraordinary adaptation, with James’ text skipping across three languages while remaining understandable. It’s also helped by onstage surtitles, but it was interesting how little the audience required them.

Jean Chan’s set – angled platforms and a sea of black plastic balls – is suitably epic, with Joe Price’s lighting and Branwen Munn’s electro-pop soundscapes transporting us back and forth between fantastical worlds. Munn’s music comes to the fore later on when actor-singer Kizzy Crawford’s Petula makes contact and delivers a haunting song of longing for things that we don’t yet know.

Amid all the madness, there is genuine heartache with two young people struggling horribly with divorce, body image and sense of worth – the adults far too self-absorbed to notice. It is the hallmark of Melquiot’s work – truth found in the grotesque – and this production captures it; a cheerfully picaresque experience, like a happy fever-dream.