The Fluellen Theatre Company is well-known and respected across the country and this year the company celebrates ten years of outstanding productions.

In 2000 Fluellen Theatre Company presented a production of Macbeth in the cellar of Swansea Wind Street’s No Sign Wine Bar.

It may have been an unconventional venue but the huge audiences gave the company a big thumbs up, and 31 major productions later, Fluellen (based in Swansea’s Grand Theatre) is now an established part of professional theatre in Wales.

The core of the company’s work always has and will be classical theatre, ranging from Greek drama to Harold Pinter via, of course, Shakespeare.

The first production of the anniversary year is more of the same, Bertolt Brecht’s monumental classic of 20th century theatre, The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The critic Victor Lange has said: “In no other play of Brecht’s are his unfailing sense of the theatre, his poetic power, and his ethical convictions blended with equal skill.”

Written in America in the 1940s after Brecht had fled from the Nazis in his native Germany, the play tells a thrilling and dramatic story.

In the carnage of a civil war, a little boy is left abandoned. A serving girl risks her life to save him and brings him up as her own child.

Several years later the boy’s mother returns to claim him. The dispute must be settled, but the case is given to a notoriously dissolute and corrupt judge. How can a correct verdict be reached?

Fluellen`s production of this vastly entertaining and accessible play features Swansea-born actress Lisa Zahra, who will be making her debut for the company.

Also in the cast are Rachel Dean, Steve Grey, Robert Hopkins, Dan Jones, Charlotte Rogers and James Scannell.

It will also feature the professional debut of seven-year-old Morgan Davies-Walker from Pontardawe, who will be playing the role of Michael, the abandoned boy.

He is a pupil of Swansea’s Class Act Theatre School, which has linked with Fluellen on many recent productions.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle was initially intended for Broadway but it never quite made it there, but was instead premiered by students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1948.

It wasn’t performed professionally until 1954 by Brecht’s own company The Berliner Ensemble, when he had returned to Germany.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle plays at the De Valence, Tenby, tonight (Thursday) at 7.30pm. Tickets are £8.50, or £6.50 for concessions. Call the box office 01834 843568.