Christmas seemed to come early to Port Talbot in 2018 when residents woke up to find that Banksy, like some street art Santa, had gifted the town with his latest work. Graffitied in the shadows of the steelworks, “Season’s Greetings” appeared to festively depict a child with their tongue outstretched, catching snowflakes. Seen from a different perspective it was revealed to be falling ash.
Written by Tracy Harris and Paul Jenkins (who also directs) and edited from more than 150 hours of interviews with those whose lives were affected by Banksy’s intervention, Port Talbot Gotta Banksy is a verbatim account of what happened next: the welcome and unwelcome attention, political inertia compounded by austerity, and how working-class communities are always subject to the whims of global market forces, be those of steel or the art world.
Designed by Cai Dyfan and with a strikingly effective lighting design by Cara Hood, it is sensitively staged and performed by a superb ensemble of six, with Jalisa Phoenix-Roberts particularly affecting. As the text is delivered while the performers listen to the original interviews through earpieces – put on at the performance’s beginning, touchingly removed towards the end – the technique’s precision speaks to the care with which the production regards its interviewees. Throughout, this feels like an important theatrical corrective, giving voice to those who are so often sidelined.
But what the verbatim text gains in authenticity also exposes the constraints of the form. Narrative momentum is mostly driven by prerecorded journalistic reports, and episodic scenes of descriptive direct address often hint at potentially richer dramatic currents; the subtext in a pregnant pause, the wife and mother with a vodka bottle in her dressing gown who has buried a husband and son, the barely suppressed urgency with which an unemployed steelworker offers his phone number.
One feels that there are other compelling stories here that deserve to be told, without needing to be refracted through a single artwork. But in its most stirring moments, this is a heartfelt celebration of a community’s resilience and agency, attested to in a triumphant closing montage of the street art that has sprouted in Port Talbot in the intervening years.
• At The Plaza, Port Talbot 15-17 May; then touring Milford Haven, Swansea and Wrexham
