thu 28/03/2024

National Theatre Wales

Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited, National Theatre Wales

Dylan Thomas’ iconic play Under Milk Wood boasts a host of colourful characters. From the blind sea Captain Cat to the loveable Polly Garter washing the steps of the welfare hall, the play is a play for voices; a play for characters. Thomas, born in...

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Listed: Celebrating Dylan Thomas

It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been...

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Tonypandemonium, National Theatre Wales

Henry James said, “Realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas Romanticism is something we will never encounter.” The 19th-century Realists believed that “ordinary people” were “fit to be endowed” with the greatness of...

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Praxis Makes Perfect, National Theatre Wales

Almost before the dust has settled on their globe-spanning collaboration with New National Theatre Tokyo, National Theatre Wales embarks on a very different, if no less ambitious, partnership with the mercurial synth pop duo Neon Neon. The sometime...

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Coriolan/us, National Theatre Wales/RSC

National Theatre Wales like the word “us”. It was there in Michael Sheen’s Passion of Port Talbot – its film adaptation was called The Gospel of Us – and it is here, prominently, in the multi-layered title of Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’ latest...

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In Water I'm Weightless, National Theatre Wales

Adrian Burley MP would probably call In Water I’m Weightless “leftie multicultural crap”. I’d like to bestow similar praise. In common with Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony, director John McGrath’s exploration of issues facing disabled people...

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Little Dogs, National Theatre Wales/Frantic Assembly

Ever since the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz documented the debauchery of South Wales nightlife in a series called Cardiff at Night, there has been a kind of perverse glamour in images of scantily clad girls and young women falling down drunk...

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The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, National Theatre Wales

Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time...

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A Provincial Life, National Theatre Wales

Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as their stage for Owen Sheer’s The Passion last Easter. Setting...

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Interview: Director Peter Gill

There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-...

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2011: Tinker Tailor Minchin Sheen

On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood...

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The Village Social, National Theatre Wales

As autumn turns to winter and we enter “the dark half of the year”, National Theatre Wales opens its second season with a 16-show tour of village halls around the Principality. This is a time when the portal between ordinary life and the spirit...

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