Although he wasn't hard, if he saw something going on that he didn't like he'd get involved and often have his face smashed in. These two characters meet in Spectacle Theatre's extraordinary Bystanders. In a cold but warming little youth club on the outskirts of Hirwaun forty fourteen years olds turned up and segregated themselves on either side of the space reserved for the performance. This in itself was a kind of theatre. And Bach is a good master here for the piece is structured like a fugue in which the themes and ideas are introduced contrapuntally to one another moving in Theatre Time from the end of the story to the beginning to the middle, building to the climactic opening of the letter that we encounter at the play's start.
None wants to open the letter.
The play is an investigation into why. The logic of violence is brilliantly dramatised in the play and this is followed by a deconstruction of that play and an analysis of the violence in a workshop in which the young audience was as involved as much as it had been with the telling of the story. To be able to convey the world of the play with such clarity, focus and honesty with such economy - running as it does for only 45 minutes is a great achievement. Which is what I would expect from the undervalued Spectacle Theatre and its excellent and under-rated director Steve Davis. To have done it without any of the gimmicks that aid, shall we say, a bourgeois theatre, testifies to its integrity.