The Other Room, Cardiff
Set on the scaffolding atop a building that never gets finished, Matthew Trevannion’s two-hander is full of dazzling ideas
What goes up must come down. Gravity, light, and the endless construction of luxury flats are the inevitable forces that seem to shape the absurdism of Idle, They Yammer. Written by Matthew Trevannion, this astute and richly textured play is the final production to be staged by Cardiff pub theatre the Other Room at the site it has occupied since 2014.
Perhaps echoing Gwenlyn Parry’s canonical Welsh play Y Tŵr but written for an age of permacrisis, it takes place on a building site atop a seemingly forever unfinished tower. Here, Len and Pritchard, king and queen, labour their days, building brick by brick ever higher into the clouds as crowds amass down below and rivers burst their banks.
