Sex, austerity and mugs of vodka: how the Greek myth Iphigenia became a Welsh-language film sensation

The movie adaptation of Gary Owen’s acclaimed play Iphigenia in Splott, Effi o Blaenau, is released this month. Here, its director and crew explain why they relocated the film to a post-industrial mining town – and refused to make it in English

T he one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.”

One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales . “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on stage is really powerful.”

Four years later, she is starring in a Welsh-language film adaptation of the play, Effi o Blaenau . Funny, lairy and vulnerable, she gives one of those you-saw-her-here-first breakthrough performances. Even when Effi – the final “e” was dropped from her name for the film to conform to Welsh spelling conventions – is yelling at her longsuffering nan, her honesty and open face make it impossible not to root for her. Then, when she becomes pregnant after a big night out in Llandudno, everything changes for Effi. The film is directed by Marc Evans, who co-wrote the script with Owen, changing the location from Cardiff to Blaenau Ffestiniog, a former slate-mining town in north-west Wales.

Over a video-call, Owen says that expectations were not high for Iphigenia in Splott on opening night at the Sherman theatre in Cardiff in 2015: “They only put it on for two and a half weeks and they were quite worried about whether it would sell the tickets.” When he wrote the play, in 2014, he was living in Splott in the thick of the austerity era. “We were being told that we all had to take these cuts because we were all in it together.”

But looking around him in Splott, at people reliant on community centres and Flying Start (the Welsh version of the early-years support scheme Sure Start) to get by, it didn’t feel as if everyone was taking the same hit: “It was really apparent that if you cut public services, the people who were most vulnerable, who depended most on those services, were going to get the worst of it.” Effie was inspired partly by his neighbours across the road, who lived in supported accommodation – “not always the easiest neighbours”, he says, smiling.

His own experience went into the play, too. When his second child was born, Owen’s partner went into labour early – as Effie does. There wasn’t a bed in the special care baby unit in Cardiff, so calls were made to hospitals in Newport and Swansea. None had beds. The nearest was in Abergavenny, an hour’s drive north, but it was snowing and the road often closed in bad weather. The baby is now 13. “But weeks after he was born, I was sitting giving him a bottle and the snow was still on the mountains. He needed to be intubated as soon as he was born. If they had got in trouble, he would likely have died. It was one of those moments of going: oh, this happened because of cuts to services.”

The play he wrote in 2014 still feels horribly relevant – and continues to be staged. What does that say about the state we are in? Owen sighs. “Austerity has become the normality. Services are crumbling and life is just very hard for a lot of people. I don’t think things have got better; I think they’ve got worse.”