This year, Royal Welsh’s internal theatre company Richard Burton have spent their autumn season putting on a series of three plays: The Lonesome West, Hamlet,and, my personal favourite, Pomona. Written originally by Alistair McDowall for the College in 2014; this play is not new to the university. Despite not being new to Cardiff, the play’s themes still feel as fresh and exciting as they might have been a decade prior.

This postmodern thriller explores ideas of alienation and ignorance and poses the question: “What would happen if we were all bystanders?” McDowall answers this with intrigue, obscurity, and mystery. The foundations of the play itself are of an interactive game, much like Dungeons and Dragons, for those familiar. This is the trope that the mystery stands on: the characters we are familiarised with within the play, we realise as the plot pursues, are characters of the game, also.

Olly, our protagonist, becomes a part of this simulation in a thrilling cyclical sequence where the play ends where we began—hence McDowall’s obscurity. Searching for her sister on Manchester’s fictional “concrete island”, Olly (Ashleigh Lai) encounters the sinister underbelly of the urban—a crime ring of organ theft, prostitution, and abductions. This “concrete island” is presumably constructed to echo Jay-Z’s “Concrete Jungle”, but ironically is not where ‘dreams are made of”, but instead “a hole in the middle of the city” where dreams come to die.

The theatre was staged in a geometric round with the square stage, reflecting the Rubix cubes played with by characters as symbols of puzzlement and confusion. Not only this, but the alternate shading of the square floor felt like an optical illusion, contributing to this idea of obscurity. A visible mass of overhead lighting partially donated to this concrete asylum creation, as though the audience were in the mechanics of the crime den.

The foundations of the play itself are of an interactive game

Darker lighting, though, may have avoided the discomfort of seeing other audience faces across the room. Generally, you could feel as the audience that the actors were very much in a student company. Actor Joe Dolan (Charlie) stood out as the most convincing, naturally sinking into the role, which—including a long monologue about jizzing on the entirety of Manchester—was not an easy one.

The play opened with character Zeppo (Busa Wickramasuriya) telling Olly he “don’t get involved”. Specifically, he means the ins-and-outs of Manchester’s property, most of which he owns. As the audience, we reflect this onto our own society.

The fact we should do this was made abundantly clear as Zeppo munched childishly on McDonald’s: “D’ywan a chicken nuggere?”. Using Mc- Donald’s—an ethically concerning fast-food chain—encourages us to reflect on how we stand by in our own society, ignoring global conflict, climate crises, and suffering to not “get involved”, like Zeppo. Of course we learn that if Zeppo dug a little deeper into the ongoings of the city he dominates, he would discover the illegal activities exploiting Manchester’s most vulnerable.

This play doesn’t seem to be one that provides strict arguments—remember its obscurity—but it is one that leaves you with questions about your own behaviour. What are we ignoring in our own lives, and what might we realise if we refuted complicity?