Welsh Nonconformity and Popular Culture 8: The Stage (part two)

In the previous post, we saw that Welsh Nonconformity's involvement with 'life upon the wicked stage' (apologies to Jerome Kern) was problematic. While some people attempted to reconcile the stage and the saints, others rejected this on the grounds that theatrical performances, whatever the subject, tended to appeal to the baser elements in man and could never be used by Christians.

Others were ready to disagree, arguing that if Christianity did not produce morally uplifting plays, then the devil’s agents would be only too happy to produce plays of a very different kind. By leaving the field entirely to the devil, the church would ensure that he would prevail. One of the most prominent of these men was Beriah Gwynfe Evans, a schoolteacher at Gwynfe and Llangadog, Carmarthenshire.[1]

Beriah Evans, later a journalist and a committed Welsh Nationalist, attempted to win over Nonconformity to the stage in a very different way. His production of Owen Glyndwr at Llanberis in 1880 demonstrated that plays need not approach dubious subjects. Owen Glyndwr was followed in 1903 with Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, a play about the last Prince of the House of Gwynedd. As late as 1881, however, the Congregationalist Newspaper Y Tyst would praise the Independent churches in the Rhondda for their role in causing the collapse of the Pentre Traveling Playhouse.[2] Similarly, the 1904-5 Revival shut a number of playhouses as the players were converted or their audience dried up, although in Aberdare, Revival broke out in the theatre as people watched a performance of the play Saints and Sinners by Henry Arthur Jones.[3]

Things were changing, however. In 1917, Beriah Evans was appointed editor of Y Tyst,[4] and by the 1930s, most Chapels had their own amateur dramatic societies, although performances were always kept separate from the main services, even when JR's religious-themed 'dialogues' were being performed.[5]

[1] Dictionary of Welsh Biography, pp. 220-221.
[2] Jones, Congregationalism, p.183.
[3] Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation (Cardiff, 2004), p.367.
[4] Dictionary of Welsh Biography, pp. 220-221.
[5] Gwynn Williams, 'A Physician for Aberavon,' in Evangelical Magazine of Wales 20 (2), p.14.