Michael Sheen as Stage Manager (front) with the cast of Our Town. Photo: Helen Murray
(Swansea Grand Theatre until tomorrow, then touring to Venue Cymru, Llandudno, Theatr Clwyd, Mold, and the Rose theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames. Tour ends 28 March)
The Welsh National Theatre, a year old this month, has opened its first major production 10 miles away from the artistic director’s hometown. This is Michael Sheen, hallowed son of Port Talbot, and the first person onstage at Swansea’s ornate, 1,000-capacity Grand theatre tonight. Arriving in character as Our Town’s Stage Manager while the house lights are still on, he hangs up his hat and his coat to home-crowd applause. His lush beard and snug waistcoat give him the air of a South Walian Baptist chapel minister.
Sheen’s role in this production of American playwright Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning 1938 play, in which his character directly shapes the action, serves as a handy metaphor for his position in his new theatre company. Our Town maps the life of a community – a fictional American place, Grovers' Corners – over 12 years from 1901 to 1913, about which the Stage Manager knows the past, present and future. It's believed to have been an influence on Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, arguably Wales's best known literary work, another portrait of a place and its people.
The WNT’s productions so far have foregrounded the work of rebellious, mythologised men. A one-man play to raise funds, with TV giant Matthew Rhys playing Richard Burton, toured in November. A new play, Owain and Henry, written by the Olivier-winning Gary Owen (Iphigenia in Splott), is being staged later this year, and casts Sheen as Wales’s last native-born prince. These choices raise questions about whether a new national theatre should pitch itself around romanticised, rebellious male figures; such choices risk masking the richer, diverse range of theatre happening across Wales today.
The play’s choir sing Welsh hymns – not with rousing gusto, but an eerie, frail beauty that matches the fragility of life that this play explores
But soon into this production, Our Town feels like the perfect statement of intent, linking elements of Wales to the outside world. In the script, nearby communities' names are changed to Welsh ones, while the play’s choir sing Welsh hymns – not with rousing gusto, but an eerie, frail beauty that matches the fragility of life that this play explores. Some American references are nevertheless retained, and the production’s world floats between identifiers from both sides of the Atlantic, giving it a sense of “everyplace”, a shimmering universality.
Our Town Photo: Helen Murray
Its success rests on the strength of its all-Welsh ensemble cast, who work together nimbly and powerfully. Familiar faces from mainstream TV are here, such as Sian Reese-Williams (who led the BBC detective drama Craith/Hidden) as dutiful matriarch Mrs Gibbs and Rithvik Andugula from BBC One’s Death Valley as gentle milkman Howie Newsome. They play alongside West End veterans including Gareth Snook (recently in the Globe’s The Crucible) and relative newcomers. Particularly good are the young actors who play George and Emily, whose touching romance we follow from adolescence: Peter Devlin, an alumnus of the state-funded West Glamorgan Youth Theatre in his first theatre role, and Yasemine Özdemir, who relied on bursaries for her study, and whose early career credits include work with the RSC and at the Globe.
Working-class director Francesca Goodridge, who returned to education at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts after working in a Swansea call centre for six years, is again on brilliant form, after recently directing Nye (a National Theatre/Wales Millennium Centre co-production) and becoming artistic director of Cardiff’s Sherman theatre. She brings out the play’s themes of ageing and loss in mesmerising ways, working with acclaimed movement director Jess Williams to choreograph the cast in creating and recreating their community. With the grace of dancers, they move wooden planks to become the doors of a shop, a set of stairs, railroad tracks, the cross of a church. Reeds on castors provide balms of nature and places to hide. Wooden stepladders are used to suggest the high windows of houses (from which George and Emily shout their early flirtations) and cemetery plots in the play’s final act.
The play’s message, about seizing life in its most ordinary moments, occasionally verges close to sentimentality before pulling back. A life lived in secret (of alcoholic choirmaster Simon Stimson, played by Rhys Warrington, who hides his homosexuality) and lines about women’s laden domestic roles puncture the idea of romanticised community life. Moments revealing the unknowability of the future also hit with horror. The play’s final 40 minutes deliver gut-punches with shattering effect: the impact of an early death and the longing to return to the past are explored by characters both in life and beyond it. The dead sit on stepladders on stage, overseeing everything. When they bring their most recent arrival to the afterlife, it’s a devastating moment.
The stars come out as the play ends, at night-time. Tiny orbs of light suggest life in the windows of houses and in the night sky, mirroring those the audience will see on their different journeys as they head home. Our Town feels like a strong, crowd-pleasing choice for the WNT’s first play, with an edge that could – and should – be sharpened again for their productions to come.
