In 1924 a poem about love between two men won the highest prize in the National Eisteddfod – and the nation was outraged.

One-hundred years later a show was commissioned to reflect on the unique historical moment when Edward Prosser Rhys won the Eisteddfod crown for his poem Atgof (Memory), and the shock waves it sent through Wales.

The piece created and performed across Wales this October including Aberystwyth Arts Centre on 16 October was a 45-minute multimedia performance.

The first half involving interpretive dance and experimental music over scored by a distorted voice reading the poem, was set on a stripped-back stage featuring only a desk.

The marriage of sound design and disjointed writhing dance enhanced the poems dark undertones of shame, guilt and humanity’s more beastly nature.

The second half embodied the outrage in the form of a solo male opera singer, personifying the national outcry with verbatim quotes of critics of the time, denouncing the poem as ‘filth’ and ‘better suited to Sodom and Gomorrah than to Wales’.

All done with a backdrop of black and white footage of the moment poet Prosser Rhys wins the Eisteddfod crown.

The singer was dressed in modest mid-century underwear, as though he’d just opened his morning papers to the news.

Both the tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas’ apparel and the sudden burst into unaccompanied song sent a jolt through the audience, despite most knowing what they’d signed up for.

Though the two-person piece powerfully and uniquely underscored the internalised and state-sanctioned homophobia rife at a time when the love between two men was illegal, some of the audience wondered why they’d just sat through 20 minutes of a man shouting homophobic slurs.

Review by Debbie Luxon.