Apart from Dylan Thomas's ubiquitous Under Milk Wood (1954), modern Welsh drama has had a low profile in the British theater. Dramatists who write within wider traditions and schools of drama have often been sidestreamed (some may say marginalized) into belonging to what has been constructed as specifically "Welsh" ways of writing. Such was the case with Gwyn Thomas, whose grittily and wittily realistic portrayals of South Wales life of the 1960s and 1970s were rarely seen by critics as being part of a wider, much-celebrated realism in British theater at the time. Ed Thomas has suffered the same fate, and plays such as House of America (1998) and Gas Station Angel (1998), while sharing the heightened realism of dramatists such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, as well as their dissection of the cultural vacuousness of late-twentieth-century Britain, have been reviewed indifferently by London-based critics as being too rhetorical in...