National Theatre Wales
aleks.sierz
Memory involves places, people, things and words, especially words. This abstract proposition is given knotty life in Welsh playwright Ed Thomas's extraordinary new play, On Bear Ridge, which comes to the Royal Court after opening at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff last month. Over a compellingly Beckettian 85 minutes, conceived and staged as a rare example of metaphysical theatre, he shows how the decay of language eats away at memory, identity and life. Yes, it's a grim story of loss in a metaphorically resonant absurdist fable. And one in which Rhys Ifans performs a masterclass in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most - as evidenced by the continuing worldwide success of this all-male comedy troupe after more than 40 years. Now they're in London, and this second programme proves that they can be just as diverse as any great Russian company, taking in as it does the romantic ballet Les Sylphides, the Imperial kitsch-fest Don Quixote, and modern American masters Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Trojan War has been going on for nine years when Homer's account begins in The Iliad. Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes have been developing their version of the story, using Christopher Logue's War Music, for nearly half as long. True, when they staged The Persians by Aeschylus for National Theatre Wales in 2010, The Iliad was not yet on the agenda, but now they say that a through-line is clear from that production to their present National Theatre Wales project."We couldn't have done Coriolan/us in 2012 without The Persians or this one without Coriolan/us," says Pearson. The link is their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gruff Rhys has called it the Great Welsh Media Gang-Bang. This year everyone who is anyone (who can get funding) has hopped on a plane for Argentina to follow in the footsteps of the 150 Welsh men, women and children who emigrated to Patagonia 150 years ago – broadcasters, musicians, politicians, journalists, comedians.Meanwhile, back in Wales, the 150th anniversary has occasioned the first ever collaboration between Wales’s two national theatres: National Theatre Wales and its Welsh-language sibling Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. The production is called {150} and it is the brainchild of Marc Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As of next year, John McGrath will be the most senior artistic director of a national company in the land. Rufus Norris will be freshly installed at the National Theatre of Great Britain on the Southbank. Laurie Sansom started at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013. McGrath launched National Theatre Wales in 2009. Since the first production, A Good Night Out in the Valleys, toured the old Miners’ Institutes of the South Wales coalfield in March 2010, McGrath has set about staking out new notions of what a national theatre can be. That first season offered 13 productions which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.The roaring boy who lived hard and died young has been iconised on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and gave his name to a scrawny-voiced crooner from Minnesota (although this is sometimes disputed by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 themselves the challenge of producing 12 productions in their first 12 months, this building-less company have somehow turned a modest (not to say meagre) £1 million a year subsidy into a living, risk-taking tradition of national theatre. Their latest play, Peter Gill’s Chekhov adaptation A Provincial Life, not only marks a rare visit for the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To begin at the end, this was an astonishing creation, a piece of street theatre of transcendental power which no one who was there at the death last night could or will ever forget. Those witnesses included what felt like the whole population of Port Talbot who filled the streets in their many thousands - 5000? Double it and then some - to witness one of their own drag a cross for two gruelling miles from the town centre to a traffic island on the sea shore, there to be crucified, there to achieve a genuine miracle: the resurrection of a condemned town. After this breathtaking act of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Either it’s a bizarre accident. Or there’s something in the water. Port Talbot, the unlovely steel town in Wales where smoke stacks belch fumes into the cloudy coastal sky, has been sending its sons to work in Hollywood for decades now. Richard Burton was the first to put his glowering blue eyes and golden larynx at the service of Tinseltown. Anthony Hopkins, for all his American passport, has never shed the native tinge from his accent. And in recent years there has been Michael Sheen (b. 1969).Right from the start it was clear that Sheen was more suited to playing oddballs and misfits than Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From seat 17 of Row 8, Block M35, Stair 14, Level 4, in a gathering of 75,000 spectators, almost all of them Welsh, it’s difficult to argue with the idea that Wales already has a national theatre. It’s called the Millennium Stadium (picture below). Just before kick-off yesterday afternoon, from my high-altitude perch, I looked across to the distant tunnel opposite. Its jaws belched fire and smoke and, in due course, a pumped-up team in red shirts. Their entry was greeted by a dozen gas-powered jet flames dotted around the touchline, spurting up towards the stadium roof. And then all those Read more ...