Thank goodness for the British public’s ability to laugh at itself, otherwise the soggy weather might prove too much when it starts lapping at our ankles. Also, we wouldn’t have the fantastic production of the Harri Parri’s Leaving do, a light-hearted musical look at life in rural West Wales that deserves a far greater audience than the dozen or so who watched it with me.
The daughter of the Harri-Parri clan, Anni, is off to London and the bright lights. Now that she has guests, since the audience are supposedly a broken-down busload of tourists, she can give them cake and show them her agricultural rosettes. This provides the springboard for Anni, her brother Ifan and cousin Deiniol, alongside the Slovakian farmhand Branek, to take us on a musical tour of their daily life. These include numbers satirising the day-to-day life, (‘joining an all-male choir with a fancy blazer’), rants at ‘weekenders’ and a fantastic musical description of Rumourz (with a ‘z’), West Wales’ premier nightclub, complete with strobe lights and dodgy dancing. The songs are witty, with some excellent harmonies and a steady Branek (Gareth Griffiths) on the piano.
The cast are fantastic at capturing the tit-for-tat nature of family squabbling. Anni is the heart of the family, and her imminent move to London keeps the plot nicely chugging away. Deiniol casts himself as the aloof one, with more than a hint of Graham Norton’s cameo in Father Ted. We soon find out his much-vaunted travels didn’t end as they wanted to. Ifan’s dalliances with the ladies are dealt with in a superb rap that means you will never look at Eminem in the same way again. And Brannek, channelling Borat and Manuel from Fawlty Towers, provides the audience with translations of Welsh. Although none of the songs particularly stick in the memory, it’s a fond and light-hearted look at a piece of the world many will only know from Gavin and Stacey and jokes about sheep, and is well-deserving of your time.
