Tenby's trend-setting Museum and Art Gallery, always alert to stimulating new interest, had another first last week when an invited audience was privileged to enjoy a novel premiere.
It proved to be an evening of quality entertainment and, intriguingly, it was home-spun. The town is proud of its reputation of doing things in style. The Museum shares this distinction.
Every year an attractive programme of special displays is arranged to foster interest in its wealth of material and the work of famous and not-so famous artists is frequently exhibited in its galleries.
Currently on show is an exhibition of the work of the renowned artist Gwen John. It embraces drawings from the collection of the National Gallery of Wales with additional works from the Tenby Museum's own collection.
The exhibition, opened at the end of July, closes at the end of this month. To mark the occasion a new work, written by a talented young member of the Museum's staff, Mark Lewis, was given its first public airing.
A Face Behind The Glass is a dramatic monologue in which the artist tells the story of her colourful life from her birth in Haverfordwest in 1876 to her sudden death in Dieppe shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Ingeniously a voice-over from brother Augustus John relates the occasion of her sad demise.
Mark Lewis, now 30, was educated at Greenhill School before graduating from Trinity College, Carmarthen. He first joined Tenby Museum as a volunteer in 1994, but has now been a member of the staff for nearly five years.
His duties include cataloguing, collection management and the researching of display and exhibition material. He was the author of the pamphlet biography of the Tenby-born artist Augustus John, Gwen's brother. He wrote a brief history of photography and Tenby photographers for an exhibition he researched on the subject. He has written articles for local journals and has had a number of pieces of poetry published here and in America.
But A Face Behind The Glass is his first major project and it reveals a promising literary talent. Obviously a great admirer of Gwen John's work, he has meticulously researched her life and career to produce a work which runs to over an hour in length.
Gwen recalls that her mother died when she was young. 'I did not miss my mother for it is hard to miss what you never knew' - but her hymn-loving aunts were a duo who 'waved their faith like banners in the breeze.'
Her solicitor father was a man of strict habit who built a house at Broad Haven which he named Rorke's Drift.
Gwen was eight when the family moved to Tenby, 'a town of elegant bathers cavorting in the fresh open air.' She and Augustus regarded their Tenby home, Victoria House, as a stifling cage. Their father appeared to deny them even the most basic freedoms of childhood.
They were four children and Augustus and Gwen spent most of their time in the attic sketching the views. They remained passionate about art.
Gwen says her education, at a private school, had virtually finished at 15 when, to her chagrin and intense dislike, she had developed the qualities of a lady and she found herself 'infused with the primness of Tenby society that was difficult to remove.'
But she found freedom in the coast and countryside and she took her sketchbook with her as she cycled down the 'myriad verdant roadways that stretched like spiders webs across Pembrokeshire.'
Gwen was desperate to follow her brother Augustus when he left Tenby to join the Slade School of Art in London. A year later her wish was fulfilled when she arrived in London at the age of 18.
She recalls: 'I keep no real memento from my days at Tenby but certain memories will always return like the ocean to the shore.'
Of the unexpected curtain of modesty she found at the Slade she remembers, 'Life classes sustained this air of self-conscious coyness: here nudity required a classic pose.'
At the Slade, Gwen won a certificate for figure composition, but in the early 1900s she moved to Paris with Augustus's great infatuation Dorelia.
'Money was short and comforts were few. We earned our money from modelling... I found my nudity strangely refreshing for I knew that to the crowd who sat surrounding me I was no more than a tone, a challenging curve, a shifting line to be captured.'
Meanwhile, Augustus continued to 'pursue Dorelia like a dog with a bone.'
In 1907, Gwen John met the man who was to become the greatest influence on her life - the great sculptor Auguste Rodin, who she realised was in constant demand both as a sculptor and a lover.
To her relief Rodin was impressed with her on their first meeting, complimenting her on her corps admirable and inviting her to start modelling for him the following day.
'In my nudity before this great man I felt such pleasure. Here I truly was revealing my inner spirit as well as my outer shell which pleased him so much and, in doing so, pleased me so much too...
'Soon we became lovers, my master and I, and what sweet and cruel love! Such heartfelt headstrong love!'
Gwen was 28 at the time, Rodin 63.
Mark Lewis writes convincingly and ecstatically of the great liaison between artist and model. He highlights the sensuality of the relationship with vivid phrasing.
Gwen says of Rodin: 'He was my first true calling, my lustful vocation. When I was with him I trembled like a flower in longing and anticipation, waiting to be plucked. When we were apart I trembled out of fear of his leaving, of his casting me aside... until nothing else mattered, until every other thing that had once existed in my life was trivialised and filtered out.'
It is Gwen's soul searching recollections of her amour Auguste that provide the most colourful and revealing passages of the monolgue.
They certainly impressed Sue Crockford, star of many Tenby Players productions, who undertook the exacting role of Gwen John. She read the Rodin 'scenes' with the intense passion of a woman deeply in love, her voice rising to an excited climax.
It was an onerous role for Sue. She had little time to study the script, which posed several difficult challenges.
Her normal fair curls concealed in a tightly drawn wig gave her a rather forbidding demeanour, but her whole aura fitted the role admirably. Her calm expression and skilful articulation of a lengthy monologue contributed to a very impressive one-off performance.
I felt I was really listening to Gwen John, the somewhat tragic genius who says of herself 'I have followed the dictates of my heart and have done so knowingly. I can do no more.'
The atmosphere of the whole occasion was remarkable. From atop Castle Hill one could hear the waves crashing around St. Catherine's Island as Gwen John must have heard them more than once.
We sat in the intimate atmosphere of the attractive new gallery with Gwen's drawings and paintings hanging on the walls beside us. It was a unique and memorable experience.
Mark and Sue thoroughly deserved the ovation they received. Tenby is still producing talented people as it did a hundred years ago.
Incidentally, another gifted actor, Laurie Dale, contributed to the voice-over lines which were a brief but effective part of the production.