FLEXIBLE (and very successful) author Ed Thomas talks to Alun Prichard about the challenges of converting raw words into theatre AS Wales's most successful playwright with three BAFTAs to his name you might expect Ed Thomas to be a little precious about his work. But Welsh speaker Thomas who has won a string of awards including BBC and Time Out Writer Of The Year is happy to see his writing cut, and slams authors who expect their work not to be altered: "A script works great as a one dimensional piece on a page but once you move it to 3D with actors, and the demands of staging it and so on it obviously evolves. "I often feel uncomfortable when people say that the author's word is sacred in the theatre - it's sacred once that process of evolution is finished. Authors should be flexible enough to think that you evolve a drama into a three dimensional shape and part of that process is that you have to cut and change the script occasionally." Thomas's first play in five years, Stone City Blue, opened at Clwyd Theatr Cymru last night, and as director of the play as well as its author he has had to put his opinions on evolving a script to work. "The irony is that you can be a lot more brutal as a director if it is your own script as you don't need the writer's permission to cut it, so I've cut about 15 pages out of the original 120 pages of the drama to get it down to film length." The demands of film are well known to Thomas who adapted his first play House Of America for the cinema, and has since worked on a number of projects for the big screen. So with his return to writing a play, his tenth, after a five year gap working with film, Thomas has found himself comparing the two art forms. "The word in theatre has to carry more emphasis than in film but you also have to keep the visual side as well. A lot of people will use film in theatre these days, and it is something I've done a lot of in the past but for Stone City Blue I've just used the theatre's devices, sound, actors, language and the theatre's set pieces." Stone City Blue is typical of Thomas's work, which includes Gas Station Angel and Song From A Forgotten City, in that it is raw, urban, humane and highly imaginative. Thomas describes the play: "I believe it's a little different to the other plays I've written as you've got one character played by four different voices, two men and two women. "The character Ray has been hitting the bottle hard and is right on the edge when he wakes up in an hotel room and can't remember the night before. "His memory is all shot to hell and he starts to become panic stricken as he can't remember, then slowly he discovers who is his father and worries whether he is still married, has he killed his wife or not? And all of the conversations with himself are voiced by the four actors." While dark as much of his work tends to be there is also a very funny edge to Stone City Blue. "I'm quite light myself, I just save all my darkness for the plays," he says. The 43-year-old from Cwmgiedd in the Swansea Valley says he started out reading scripts rather than writing them. "For my sins I was in Pobol Y Cwm for about a year as a doctor," he says with a laugh. "Not many people know that. "I was living in London doing the usual for an actor - bar work, and I ran a fringe theatre down in Fulham. I saw they were auditioning for a doctor in Pobol Y Cwm and I got the job," he says laughing long and loud. "While I was in Wales in 1988 I was writing House Of America. When that came out I had the choice: stay as an actor, and I was a shambles of an actor, or write and be a director. That's what I enjoy so I made the decision." Of course, soon after, House Of America was made into a film by the Welsh director Marc Evans, who recently made Trauma with Colin Firth and Meena Suvari. Thomas and Evans's collaboration formed the basis for a friendship that has seen the pair team up time and again, most recently in the film Dal Yma Nawr and S4C's Fondue, Sex And Dinosaurs. "If I'm the scrum half he's the outside half," he says, "there is a link between us and there is an empathy between us so it's always easy, even though we don't work together all the time." House Of America did get the world to wake up to both Evans and Thomas but since then it has been Thomas who has forged the greater international reputation as his work has been translated into eight languages. His play Gas Station Angel about his family life in South Wales was even picked up by a Colombian theatre group after they saw its German version in Europe. So intrigued was he by their interest in his play that Thomas went out to Colombia to make a documentary on the staging of the play there for S4C called O Gwmgiedd I Bogota (from Cwmgiedd to Bogota) which is to be shown this Thursday at 9pm. Thomas says he writes 100 pages off the top of his head then reads it to find out where to go with it. "I follow that path, it is then that you see what your obsessions are and then you dramatise them basically. The more obsessions I have the more the drama," he jokes. What has stood out in the past are his obsessions which drive him toward a play with no shortage of swearing, Stone City Blue being no exception. As his own language is as colourful as a Jackson Pollock he pleads with more than a hint of irony after a flurry of four letter words: "Don't mention my swearing, because I'm a gentleman." But then, as he's admitted, he can't be precious about his words - even if they have made him our most successful playwright. * Stone City Blue runs until Saturday, November 6 at Clwyd Theatr Cymru. | 
