Owen Brecon is a character in David’s 2016 play Signals. Owen is an elderly Welsh poet living in small cottage in a remote valley with his daughter, Dawn.
Once a rising star – ‘Wales’s greatest nature poet, 1984!’ (The Guardian) – he has fallen out of favour and has become embittered and reclusive.
Owen is loosely based on the real-life Welsh poet R.S. Thomas
(1913 – 2000), who was an Anglican priest and nature poet. Owen has
something of Thomas’s bleak, unsentimental view of the world, but applied tonour twenty-first century preoccupations.
In the play, Owen does battle with a telecommunications company who want to install a tall mast in his idyllic Welsh valley, and the comedy-drama is an essay on creativity, poetic inspiration, and our struggle to communicate with one another – a struggle which, Owen fears, is only hampered by our technological advances.
To give the character real substance, David felt obliged to create a body of work in the style of this alter-ego: The Late Poems of Owen Brecon. These verses deal with contemporary issues like smart phones, rights-of-way and dosage-medication trays, alongside enduring topics such as growing old, the war between the classes, and the power of Nature.
North-east poet Peter Mortimer, who reviewed the play, was so
impressed by the poems, some of which appear in the play, that he booked Owen to perform them at one of his regular poetry events in Whitley Bay.
Owen proved a popular draw, and has since been called upon to make other appearances.
And so it came to pass that Owen Brecon – a product of the fevered
imagination of David Farn – broke free of the shackles of a mere playscript, and became a living, breathing entity. And he’s still on the loose!