[Mr. Rhys Davies is of a lively and independent nature. In A Time to Laugh he] takes an idealistic young doctor living in a mining valley in Wales and pushes him into the middle of the working-class conflict at the beginning of this century. The doctor breaks with his bourgeois girl, who is very well drawn—how well we know one another, we bourgeois!—marries a working-class girl—not so well known—and goes to live in the toughest slum of the town. There is some romantic wish-fulfilment going on here, but the material is excellent, in the first place because the Welsh are a nation of toughs, rogues and poetic humbugs, vivid in their speech, impulsive in behaviour and riddled with a sly and belligerent tribalism. Mr. Rhys Davies handles this expertly. He is passionate, athletic, comical and lyrical by turns. He is out in the streets...