A Ladder of Words: Mid-Twentieth-Century Welsh Plays in English

When the north Wales-born actor and playwright Emlyn Williams performed his one-man show about Dylan Thomas, the critic Richard Findlater described him as ‘unravelling a ladder of words’ which he then climbs up, and pulls the spectators after him. Findlater called this ‘the Cambrian rope trick,’ highlighting the process by which writers, and Welsh writers in particular, use the power of language to take an audience into an unfamiliar world. This volume brings together three Welsh plays from...