Drama
Apart from being an important figure in Welsh poetic circles Cynan was also influential in the field of Welsh drama. He wrote two full length plays: Hywel Harris won the premier Eisteddfod prize for drama in 1931. He was commissioned to write an exemplary play for the National Eisteddfod in 1957 – his offering Absolom Fy Mab was accepted to great critical acclaim in Welsh dramatic circles as were his translations of English Language plays John Masefield's Good Friday and Norman Nicholson's The Old Man of the Mountain.
In 1931 he was appointed reader of Welsh plays on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain, a post which he held till the abolition of censorship in 1968. He was seen as a liberal censor, having allowed James Kitchener Davies' drama Cwm Glo, a play full of "filth and depravation" to be performed after it won the drama prize in the 1934 Eisteddfod.
Cynan made regular appearances on Welsh language radio and TV programmes, and he was the subject of the first Colour TV programme broadcast in the Welsh Language Llanc o Lŷn.
Read more about this topic: Albert Evans-Jones
Famous quotes containing the word drama:
“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
—Eleonora Duse (1858–1924)
“It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
—Jack Lemmon (b. 1925)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)