The Corn is Green is a largely autobiographical play set in a mining community in Wales about an exceptional teacher Miss Moffat (Nicola Walker) and her schoolboy student Morgan Evans (Iwan Davies).  There are two interesting time shifts about the writing and setting.  Emlyn Williams wrote it in 1938 when he was 33 looking back at his schooldays but set it in late Victorian times, several years before he was born. 

The play opens with, in silhouette, a party from the 1930s where grown up Emlyn Williams (Gareth David-Lloyd), now a famous actor and writer,  is thinking back to his schooldays and his days in the mining village.  Black faced miners assemble as Emlyn Williams looks at both the worlds he occupies.  The miners sing as only the Welsh can. 

Emlyn takes to his typewriter which continues typing on its own.  Enter the cheerful and contained Miss Moffatt (Nicola Walker) who has inherited a large house and who determines to start a school.  The local squire (Rufus Wright) often a comedic figure assumes it cannot be a woman who wrote to him because the letter paper wasn’t scented.  Miss Moffatt is an educated woman and a philanthropist as she employs Mrs Watty (Jo McInnes) a woman with a “light fingered” past.