★★★★☆
Here’s a revival that will divide audiences. On one side will be those who feel that Dominic Cooke’s take on Emlyn Williams’s semi-autobiographical drama — premiered back in 1938 — puts them in mind of an undertaker who has dressed up a customer with lots of rouge and a shiny new toupee.
I’m more sympathetic. Yes, Williams’s account of an academically gifted working-class boy who gets a ticket out of a Welsh mining community is more than a little melodramatic. Some of the characters, including a squire who can’t see why the labouring classes need to go to school in the first place, are caricatures.
But Cooke’s framing device helps scrape away most of the layers of sentimentality, turning the piece into a memory
