Since Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, it is said that not a day has passed when the Pulitzer prize-winning show hasn’t been performed. “Every time I read it, I come away with the feeling of having been woken up,” says Michael Sheen, star of the upcoming touring production of Wilder’s play about a close-knit community in small-town America. “With this urgent sense of ‘I have to not waste this.’”
Transposing the heart of the American classic to Wales, this new production also marks the launch of Welsh National Theatre, a hugely ambitious company formed – and financed – by Sheen in response to the collapse of the former National Theatre Wales. “Opening night is going to be more than just the opening night of a play,” says Russell T Davies, the show’s creative associate. “I think in 10 years, we’ll be having a marvellous celebration that all began with Our Town.”
The creation of Welsh National Theatre is a galvanising statement of intent, particularly given the increasing number of theatres in Wales facing cuts and closures. Aiming to champion big stories on big stages, the new venture stands up against the continual devaluing of the arts, with a recent cross-party report finding that Wales spends less on culture than almost every other European nation (the only country lower is Greece). Alongside the closure of National Theatre Wales, recent years have seen significant cuts to beloved institutions including Welsh National Opera, Theatr Clwyd and Theatr Na nÓg. Despite an abundance of talented writers and performers in Wales, the theatrical ecosystem has not been blossoming with hope.
Now into that picture bursts Welsh National Theatre, a company fuelled by the desire to create large-scale platforms for Welsh talent, at home and internationally, and to influence and expand the Welsh canon. Sheen says he wanted to “go back to basics” with a company that blends a community focus with grand, global ambition, “to attract and build an audience, and use that as an engine to address the more infrastructural problems. Like directors being able to take a step up to bigger stages and playwrights being able to write the plays they want to write, rather than having to be too limited by practicalities.”
The new company’s opening season sees Our Town followed by Owain & Henry, a new play by Iphigenia in Splott’s writer Gary Owen. A co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre, the show will once again star Sheen, this time as Owain Glyndŵr, the 15th-century Welsh separatist who raised a rebellion against King Henry IV. Matthew Rhys will then lead Mark Jenkins’s Playing Burton, a thorny tribute to the great Welsh actor Richard Burton. “You build upwards,” Sheen says of his plans for the company, “looking at rediscovering Welsh plays, but also looking for world drama that could be adapted for Wales.”
The idea to launch Welsh National Theatre with Our Town began with the actor’s desire to give a larger platform to the show’s director, Francesca Goodridge, also artistic director of Cardiff’s Sherman theatre. “One of the challenges we have in Wales is for Welsh directors to work on main stages,” says Sheen. “They’re working in studio spaces and the knock-on effect is that writers write plays for smaller casts. That limits the sort of stories we’re telling in Wales.” The pair met on Nye, Tim Price’s grand tale of the NHS, which Goodridge co-directed with Rufus Norris for the show’s revival, and in which Sheen played Labour politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan. Sheen had seen Goodridge’s work before on Richard Mylan’s unflinching show about drug addiction, Sorter, at Grand Theatre Swansea, where Our Town will open, as well as on Patrick Hamilton’s nihilistic thriller Rope, at Theatr Clwyd. “He said: ‘I love what you do, and I’d love to see it on a bigger scale,’” Goodridge says, and laughs. “I was like: ‘Yeah, me too.’”
Sheen describes Goodridge’s plays as “terrific, but I could see she was theatrically straining at the leash. So I said: why don’t we do something together? By me being in it, it can be on a main stage.” He means this entirely without ego. Sheen is simply, as Davies notes, “a man who makes things happen”.
For Goodridge, who is drawn to large ensemble and movement-led pieces, transposing the essence of Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners to Wales seemed obvious; the community already felt familiar to her. “You’re seeing two mums gossiping in the garden,” she says. “The kids who start to fancy each other in school. The guy delivering the milk. The routines. It feels like where I grew up.” Goodridge was raised in Fforestfach, Swansea, on the same street as her sister and uncle. “If we were out of milk, I’d go two doors up,” she says. “This play is purposefully saying: we’re an ordinary town. Then in the third act, it tells you that everything you’d thought was mundane is actually what builds all the extraordinary moments of your life.” It is about the details you miss, the things you forget to pay attention to, but which collectively make up a life worth living. “The smell of my mum’s kitchen,” Goodridge says. “Watching my niece grow up.” She hopes audiences will “leave wanting to call the person they love”.
As the Welsh cast have been exploring the American play, the fit has felt just right. “I think it’s perfect for a Welsh accent,” says Sheen, “because the language is quite lyrical, quite sing-songy.” Davies, who directed Sheen in a local youth theatre production aged 24, when the actor was in his teens, has been liaising with the Wilder estate to “ease the production into a bit more of a Welsh idiom,” he says. “They protect the play beautifully, so they obviously don’t want things changed too much.” His initial suggestions of switching words to better fit cultural norms – like changing baseball for rugby – were gently dismissed, “because that’s what Wilder wrote”, Davies says, “and I was never there to trample on his words.” What they decided, Davies says, is that it feels “like a Welsh community in America, like we have in Patagonia”.
They started to think more imaginatively about how this adaptation might work. “We’ve got the beauty of being able to use our own language,” says Goodridge. One significant decision to help the play fit the Welsh cast has been to translate the hymns. “Hearing them all sing like a big Welsh choir,” Goodridge smiles, touching her neck, “your hair stands on end.” The show has a cast of 18 Welsh actors, a rare and wonderful thing. In the 90s, Davies remembers, he was told to take Welsh characters out of his writing. “A head of drama at ITV said people don’t like the Welsh,” he recalls. “So I’ve always quietly fought that fight. But it takes someone who’s not quiet, like Michael, to lead the way.” Now, being involved in such a grand Welsh story, Davies says, gives him “immense pride”.
The play can be misread as twee, with its stage manager (Sheen) open-heartedly introducing the town’s jumble of characters. But to see only that is to miss the play’s muscle. “Wilder’s using this stereotypical idea of small-town life in order to tell a story that is much steelier and harder to be confronted by,” says Sheen. The events of the play end just before the first world war and Wilder was writing it just before the second world war. “The rivers are rising and there’s a sense of something coming,” Sheen says, “of people suffering and it not being addressed. I think Wilder was warning people about the rise of fascism, saying all this could get washed away. But I don’t think the point of it is to say it’s tragic.” When a core character dies, Sheen says, “the point is to go: how did they live?”
As Goodridge and Sheen started considering staging the show, National Theatre Wales was in the process of crumbling, after Arts Council Wales took away 100% of its funding. “There was a lot of discontent within the Welsh artistic community,” Sheen says, remembering the rehearsals for Nye where all the Welsh actors were discussing their opinions on “what had happened and why, and what should happen now”. His own production of The Passion, staged across his home town of Port Talbot with more than 1,000 local volunteers, would be the final production in National Theatre Wales’s 2011 opening season. The organisation had been struggling for some time, but its closure still left a huge absence in Welsh theatre. It was unclear whether anything would be able to rise from its ashes.
“No way was I going to get involved,” says Sheen, “but I got a sense of an emergency situation. It was such a tortuous journey to get a national theatre in Wales in the English language in the first place. It felt like a window of opportunity and once that window closed, it would be much harder to get that momentum going again.”
There was no public money available; the Arts Council wouldn’t fund something untested. “I realised that ultimately I had to do it,” Sheen says, matter-of-factly. “I’m the one who can open doors, and I don’t need to be paid.” The actor is known for putting his money behind causes he cares about, including recently spending £100,000 to pay off £1m of debt for people in south Wales. Fronting his own money for National Theatre Wales, he “paid for whatever needed paying for, did whatever was needed to get the ball rolling”.
The company got a little transitional funding that had previously gone to National Theatre Wales, set up as a completely new company – “the previous organisation brought a lot of baggage with it,” Sheen says – and secured funding for the opening season from the Colwinston Charitable Trust. They also made partnerships with BBC Studios and Bad Wolf, the production company behind Doctor Who. Sheen doesn’t want them to be vulnerable by relying too heavily on one funding source. “We’re looking for funding from all sorts of places,” he says, “and I’m still underwriting stuff. That’s the way we’ll keep moving forwards.”
Doing what he can to make this company possible seems to be a basic instinct to Sheen. He has a clarity of vision that appears to whittle down to the idea that if he thinks something should be done, and he has the ability to do it, he will throw himself into it entirely. This translates into his wider understanding of community, which forms the centrifugal force behind much of what he does with his money and time. “As I’ve got older,” Sheen says, “it’s become clearer to me that at some point in your life, you’re going to need help, and at that point, one has to hope that help will be there. That is what community is. We all need help at some point, so we should all think about giving it at some point as well.”
This opening show has also been made possible through its co-production with the Rose theatre in Kingston, south-west London, where Our Town will finish after touring Wales. Sheen partly modelled this on the success of Nye, co-produced by the National Theatre and Wales Millennium Centre. That play demonstrated “the real appetite”, Sheen says, for a big story on a big stage, with its size only manageable through the collaboration of multiple theatres. “Co-producing is essential at the moment,” says the Rose’s artistic director Christopher Haydon. “The finances of the industry generally mean it’s incredibly hard for any theatre to produce on their own.” Co-production also enables greater ambition, Haydon points out. “It’s one of the largest shows the Rose has put on in a long time,” he says.
“Scale is important,” Goodridge agrees. “We have big stories to tell.”
Before it gets to London, passing Llandudno and Mold on its way, Our Town will open at the Grand theatre in Swansea. “When you read a play, you read it in your own accent,” says Goodridge. “So you see your own community. In my head, this has always been a Swansea town.” The Grand, close to where Goodridge grew up, and Sheen’s closest theatre now, runs without an artistic director; instead the councilbooks touring shows. Starting the production and the new company there matters, says Davies: “Now you can be 15 years old living in Swansea and seeing things happening on your doorstep. See the rehearsals are just down the road on the seafront. See local actors are in it. Friends of your mums and dads are in it.”
This is part of the hope of Welsh National Theatre: to build talent and belief and possibility. “That’s how you create a community,” Davies says. “That’s how you create ambition for generations to come.”
Our Town is a Rose theatre and Welsh National Theatre co-production. The show is at Swansea Grand theatre to 31 January and transfers to the Rose theatre in Kingston, London, 26 February to 28 March, after runs at Venue Cymru, Llandudno, 3 to 7 February and Theatr Clwyd, Mold, 11 to 21 February.
