Can one star save Welsh theatre? On a spring morning in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), 180 people are thronging for the answers. We’re in the Awen bar next to the gorgeous 1,900-capacity Donald Gordon theatre, which last summer staged the hit play Nye, about NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. This experience inspired its lead actor, Michael Sheen, to set up the new Welsh National Theatre (WNT), as he tells us today, scruffy-bearded and check-shirted, bouncing around a much smaller, makeshift stage. “Listen,” he says, responding to an apology for this stage’s minuteness, “I’ve acted in Aberavon shopping centre, so I’m used to being on anything.”
Sheen’s latest venture arrives after a hell of a few months, as we Welsh people say, for English-language theatre in Wales. In December, the Cardiff-based National Theatre Wales (NTW – a separate organisation, founded in 2009) closed down, stripped of all Arts Council funding. In January came a cross-party Welsh Senedd report, A Decade of Cuts, revealing Wales ranked second to bottom for cultural spending in Europe (at £69 per person, above only Greece; by comparison, the UK received £91, neighbouring Ireland £149 and poll-toppers Iceland £691).
Creu Cymru, a body representing performing-arts organisations across Wales, published an even gloomier sector snapshot, underlining “the consistent devaluing of arts and culture through cuts to public funding, and the absence of obvious advocacy at a public and political level.” The Arts Council of Wales has since announced an extra £4.4m for arts and culture in the country, but redundancies and threats of closure to venues remain rife. Which raises the question: is Sheen’s advocacy enough?
In 2016, I moved back to my native Wales, where Sheen is embraced like a national hero. Today, his energetic persona – part everyman poet, part political orator next door – is undeniably infectious. He announces the theatre’s programme: a Wales-set, touring co-production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which inspired Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood; and Owain & Henry, a WMC-staged epic about Owain Glyndŵr’s battles with Henry IV. But do his plans help or hinder other theatre-makers in a bold, diverse, modern Wales? And can the WNT quieten murmurings of concern among some figures in the industry?
To begin at the beginning: English language theatre in Wales doesn’t just happen in Cardiff, a city only two hours from London (although though it also hosts the award-winning Sherman theatre, acclaimed pub venue The Other Room, and dynamic companies such as Hijinx, Taking Flight and Theatr Iolo). In the south Wales valleys are the RCT Theatres, and going west, there’s Milford Haven’s producing theatre, the Torch, Neath’s innovative company Theatr na nÓg and busy hubs such as the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, whose summer season attracts 6,000 people every year.
Heading north, there’s Bangor’s Pontio, and one of Wales’s premiere producing theatres Theatr Clwyd in Mold, which reopens this summer after three years, following a £50m capital development project part-funded by the Welsh government. Recent successes include Laura Wade’s Olivier award-winning play Home, I’m Darling (starring Katherine Parkinson) and 2019’s rapturously received community production The Mold Riots.
For full disclosure, I’ve been working with Theatr Clwyd this year, interviewing staff, volunteers, locals, actors and directors about its profound legacy within the small town. One retired brickmaker, Philip Jones, brought me all his 1980s programmes and told me how he fell in love with new storytelling. “The theatre stopped me being a bigot, it stopped me being a racist – it changed my life.”
A musical, a community-created play and a debut by Welsh writer Chris Ashworth-Bennion all feature in Theatr Clwyd’s opening season under new artistic director Kate Wasserberg. Sheen spoke to her in March. “He was very curious, wanting to help,” she says, “and refreshingly honest about his using his fame for good, going, ‘Would it be helpful if I was in that play?’” He is also excited by artists that he discovers, she adds. “But, of course, it’s early days, so getting to know each other is really important.”
Projects running in partnership already thrive across the country, according to an Arts Council of Wales report published last week. These include Craidd (meaning “core” or “heart”), a project bringing theatre to deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people, and Open Book, offering theatre freelancers fully paid shadowing work. NTW’s community-focused project Team also continues as a stand-alone entity – and despite being criticised for staging too few productions, and using non-Welsh writers and directors to make plays about Wales, NTW did have some notable successes, including 2011’s three-day epic The Passion, starring Sheen.
On the day of the WNT launch, Sheen announces they are receiving £200,000 from the Arts Council of Wales, transition funding from the closure of NTW. Later, I speak to the council chair, Maggie Russell. “The Welsh National Theatre is a bold new initiative and an exciting addition to Wales,” she says. “Michael has stated he’s looking for a wide variety of funding sources, and we’re really excited about him working in partnership.”
On with the show. Sheen introduces his new company in turn, including Nye writer Tim Price and TV producer Russell T Davies, who directed Sheen in a production of David Copperfield at the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre in 1987. (“That was a real turning point for me,” Sheen says, “when I started to take it seriously.”)
Four new plays have also been commissioned from emerging writers from diverse backgrounds. They include Francesca Goodridge, a working-class director from Swansea, who studied acting at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts after working in a call centre for six years. Frustrated by the lack of good parts for young women, she created the musical Shout!. Azuka Oforka, an alumna of the Sherman theatre’s Unheard Voices programme, is also a recent signing. Her hit play The Women of Llanrumney, a drama set on a Welsh-run Jamaican sugar plantation, is currently receiving rave reviews at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Down the corridor in a separate studio, I chat to Owain & Henry playwright Gary Owen about the historic lack of opportunities to present Welsh stories on a large scale. (Owen talks about the volume of Welsh monodramas, such as the recently revived Iphigenia in Splott, “Because monologues are cheap!”) People wonder why there’s never been “a Braveheart for Wales”, he says. “We need to fill that gap.”
Then I get my five minutes with Sheen – under spotlights, after he’s done the rounds for TV. I ask him if he’s been concerned that the WNT might be seen as a vanity project. He begins, carefully: “It’s a balance at first to use whatever resources we have now. One of the resources I have is a celebrity profile, to bring all these people here today to listen and set up co-productions.” He smiles his megawatt smile. “Although the co-production model is also useful because we haven’t got any money!”
He talks passionately about his youth theatre days. After that came Rada, West End theatre, films including The Queen and Frost/Nixon, and TV roles in Masters of Sex, Good Omens and Quiz – not bad work for a boy from Port Talbot. He took that free training for granted, he says: “My pathway has disappeared, but I want people to have even more opportunities.” He also talks about the importance of connecting Wales geographically (“touring is a big priority … we must remember mid Wales and west Wales”) and confirms that his theatre won’t be bilingual. He says that his first chat was with Steffan Donnelly, artistic director of the Welsh-language national theatre, Theatr Cymru (Theatr Cymru, the Welsh language national theatre, already exists.), adding: “There’s already fantastic work going on in Wales on a small and mid-scale. We want to be able to support and work in collaboration with that.”
A day after the launch, I’m contacted by a seasoned theatre professional who wishes to remain anonymous. Creu Cymru, the performing arts body whose gloomy snapshot of the industry I mentioned earlier, began its annual conference in the WMC corridors an hour after the WNT launch ended, they say. What did the WNT contribute, I ask? “Nobody from it turned up,” they reply.
This professional doesn’t doubt the “right intentions” behind Sheen’s project, and “the brilliant theatre-makers” within it, but also worries there’s “a lack of awareness” of the mentoring and development going on “every single day” across Wales. “And a new entity has just landed, with a Hollywood star fronting it, bestowing a national name upon themselves – and they’re asking for money. That’s a real worry.”
They also make another intriguing point: “If the theatre had called itself the Michael Sheen theatre, no one would mind.” It’s early days, but Sheen’s status as a national lodestar will be monitored closely, not least by the many creatives who make Welsh theatre thrive.
