Michael Sheen talks about his new play and plans or Welsh National Theatre
- ontargetmedia8
- 3h
- 11 min read
In an exclusive interview, Michael Sheen discusses why he chose Swansea Grand for Our Town, how the play resonates with Welsh audiences and his vision for the Welsh National Theatre.
Why did you decide to bring Our Town to Swansea Grand, do you think the play will resonate with Welsh audiences today?
I originally wanted to do the play in order for Francesca Goodridge, who’s directing it, to direct on a bigger stage. So that’s what came first, wanting to work with Fran. Then the next thing was that we decided to do it in Swansea, because Fran is from Swansea, the Grand Theatre is where I saw plays growing up, it’s where I take my kids to the Panto every year, and Swansea Grand is a receiving theatre as in it doesn’t create its own productions for the main stage.
Grand Ambition is a fantastic company working in the smaller stage there. So we put that part of the package there first, me and Fran at Swansea Grand. Then we had to decide what play it was going to be and we both coincidentally came up with Our Town separately because we both felt it was a play that was not as well known over here, it’s probably the most beloved play in America since 1938 when it was first performed, and apparently there hasn’t been a day since when it hasn’t been performed in America.
There was clearly an influence from Dylan Thomas writing Under Milk Wood, we know that he went over to America where he met Thornton Wilder who wrote Our Town, and there are a lot of parallels there, so there was something really lovely about bringing something full circle by bringing it to Swansea. We knew it was a beautiful, powerful, moving, gorgeous play that would give people a really fantastic experience at the theatre. It’s incredibly life affirming. It’s about community. It feels Welsh, we both felt that. We thought it could be a really meaningful experience for a Welsh audience.
As it developed further, and Russell T Davies got involved, he said ‘oh please can I be a part of it,’ I wasn’t going to say no to Russell. So it just became this wonderful developing package. We didn’t just want to take it to Swansea, we wanted to take it around Wales. Then the Rose Theatre showed an interest in doing a co-production so it made perfect sense, start in Swansea, go up to North Wales and then take it into England to show them what they’re missing.
This production has been described as a celebration of community, how are you adapting it for a Welsh stage?
The Thornton Wilder Estate are, quite rightly, very protective of the play. We did a reading of the play with Welsh actors to hear what the original text, without changing it at all, would sound like with Welsh actors playing it as Welsh characters, and it worked beautifully.
So that gave us the confidence to know that, even if we couldn’t change a word, that it would still work in the way that we wanted it to. But we are working with the estate to look into what we can do. They’re very open to hymns, there are hymns that are sung in each of the acts, so we are looking into those being adapted into Welsh. We were looking at maybe changing some of the place names into Welsh language equivalents; changing Ma and Pa into Mam and Dad, that kind of stuff. We’re still working on ways that we could change other things to make it sit more comfortably in a Welsh setting, but like I say, we did a reading and without changing a word it worked really well.
The story explores everyday life and the passage of time. How has your own perspective on those themes evolved throughout your career?
Well I think I’m not alone in thinking that you start to appreciate things in a different way, in terms of things that seemed humdrum and not very important and not of great significance when I was younger, now becoming more meaningful; just little moments of connection, moments of being with family. Especially as you start to lose very close family members, I lost my father this year, it really teaches you that something you know intellectually, people die, people leave, life isn’t forever - it’s not until you experience that up close and personal that it really hits home. It makes you want to make the most of being with the people that you love.
That’s what this play is about, certainly the last act, it hits you so hard that I think whenever I read the play or seen it I come away from it with the same feeling, which is I want to go up to every single person that I love and care about and just kind of look at them, be with them and appreciate them. Time just flies!
As you get older, things just seem to move along incredibly quickly. My eldest daughter is 26 and my two youngest are 6 and 3 and with the two youngest now I want to make the most of every moment with them…but it’s just flying by all the time. So even more so you have to just make the most of it and not take a second for granted.
You’re not only performing but also helping shape theatre in Wales, how does this production connect to that mission?
One of the things that I think is really important for us to do as a company, a national company, is to look at getting shows of real quality around Wales to audiences that maybe don’t usually have homegrown work like this, and certainly not work at the scale that we’re trying to do. We’re also trying to establish a sort of canon.
A lot of plays for so long now, writers looking at the practicalities of getting their plays done, and the idea of doing a play on a main house stage is very difficult - to get the audience, to sell it, for new work particularly - so writers haven’t previously been incentivised to write big ambitious plays. One of things we want to do is create work of real scale and get it out to as many audiences as we can around Wales and beyond; to take our work and our story, who we are, our identity, out beyond Wales’ borders and get the name of the Welsh National Theatre, the writers, the performers, out there. Not just to the UK but more internationally as well. We want to do work of real ambition and of real resonance to us as a nation and as a culture, then take that out to the world.
Following the closure of The National Theatre of Wales, after its funding from the Arts Council of Wales was cut, you decided to self-fund the new Welsh National Theatre, why was that important to you and how are things going so far?
I was part of the original season, the inaugural season of the National Theatre of Wales with The Passion, and that was such an exciting time and full of such possibility. It was so devastating, 13 or 14 years later, for it to seemingly come to an abrupt halt. With the funding cut essentially meaning that they couldn’t continue and I think the feeling was that if it was left too long it would be very difficult to get another national theatre up and running.
So without spending too long at that point, going into the ins and outs, rights and wrongs of whether there should be one atall, whether it already sort of existed in the work that was being done in Wales already in places like Theatr Clwyd, Sherman and touring companies. And Wales already has a brilliant Welsh language national theatre, Theatr Cymru, I just felt like there was a window of opportunity to get an English language national company up and running again, a new one, I felt that it was important to draw a line with what had come before and to start afresh with a very different kind of agenda, a very different set of beliefs about what we were trying to do. We wanted to do big shows that would be popular for large audiences, and specifically to do shows that had real meaning and resonance for Welsh audiences with Welsh theatre makers at the heart of it. Getting back to basics in some ways to do plays in theatres.
The work that had been done with National Theatre Wales, that was fantastic. The Passion was groundbreaking in that inaugural season, and seeing amazing shows they’d done subsequently, doing site specific stuff, working in the community, all of that work was brilliant. But I feel like now in this era that doing well-made plays, exciting, interesting, entertaining and accessible plays, in theatres should be the backbone of it and developing that audience. Having done Nye on a big stage and seeing the appetite for that story and that production was really inspirational, so using that as a kind of a benchmark and trying to take things on from there I think is really important.
It’s going really well, it’s really exciting. We’re weeks away from starting rehearsals on Our Town, working on putting the creative team on Owain & Henry together, working with Gary on the script, that’s really exciting. We’re already putting productions together for 2027 and 2028, we’ve got commissioned plays that we’re working on at the moment, we’ve been having readings and workshops at the Civic Centre, our base in Swansea. That’s been really exciting. We’re reading plays, sort of neglected classics from Wales, from Emlyn Williams to Gwyn Thomas to Frank Vickery, all kinds of people. We’re using the institution of the Welsh National Theatre as an engine to create change much more generally, much more widely through Wales, and to try and work in collaboration with as many different companies, theatres, venues and practitioners around Wales as possible, create connections and be a conduit for those partnerships.
So that’s all really very exciting. Funding is starting to come in from different sources now swell, people who want to support us. Having Matthew Rhys doing Playing Burton around Wales at the moment to raise funds for us is just brilliant. It’s so exciting and it’s going great.
How do you see the new Welsh National Theatre representing the voices and stories of modern Wales?
We’re commissioning new writing, supporting and developing that, and really promoting that. Trying to get as many diverse voices and stories into that as possible. Looking back at our past in order to understand why we are where we are, as well as trying to work out where we are in order to look at the possibilities of where we can go in the future. Creating a platform for a national conversation, and I think next year with the elections at the Senedd, the fact that we’ll be doing the play Owain & Henry which deals with the old being washed away and the new coming, not knowing what form the new is going to take. On the one hand the English version of power and leadership coming up against a new Welsh nation building, community based sense of leadership.
I think there’s gonna be a lot of exploration of national identity, what it is to be a leader? What is power? What do you use it for? What can it cost you to attain it? All of those questions I think are going to be very relevant next year. So looking at our past as well as supporting the playwrights of the present and looking for many different voices.
What has been the reaction since you announced it and how can people help support the project?
The reaction has been incredibly positive I think. People coming up to me wherever I go in Wales and beyond, just very excited about it, really hopeful and just really positive. Particularly I think because it comes at a point where we’ve been going through, and continue to go through, a really challenging time in Wales in the arts and culture.
There have been so many cuts and people feel very much that our culture is under threat and not being supported. Wales I think was second from bottom in terms of how much money was being spent on culture, second from the bottom to Greece where, ironically, theatre was born. And so to launch this company and talk about doing big, bold, audacious and ambitious work; looking to get out around Wales and internationally really goes against the current, and I think that people really appreciate that, the audacity and the ambition of it, so people have been incredibly supportive. I think there are also, completely understandably, concerns around funding and about whether we would take away funding from other companies who are doing brilliant work. I’ve said from the beginning that I was prepared to put my money in to get things started and I’m putting all my energy into trying to get as many streams of funding coming into this so that we’re not dependent overly on any one source of funding, and certainly I don’t want to take it away from others. But I do think that it’s important that this company exists and it does need support and certainly Arts Council funding is one area of that, and I’m not going to apologise for that but I am very mindful of the finite pot of money that there is for the theatre in Wales.
How can people support us - well, come and see the shows! That’s the first thing. But we’re also setting up a way for people to be able to support us, no matter how much or how little, to have a sense of ownership. We’re working all that through at the moment. But first and foremost, come and see the shows!
Looking ahead, what’s your hope for the future of Welsh theatre both at home and on the international stage and what will your role be in it moving forward?
I hope that there will be an incredibly vibrant theatre scene in Wales where there is work being toured and on our main stages. I think it’s really exciting at the moment that we have so many native Welsh people running a lot of these institutions. I think that’s really hopeful and I hope that continues. And I hope that we are able to collaborate and connect up and share resources, not just because it makes financial sense but also brings us closer together and connects us more. I hope that we can provide that kind of platform for a national conversation, not just with Welsh National Theatre but in all the venues. That would be fantastic. And I hope that we are going to see Welsh National Theatre not only in theatres in Wales but on the West End stage and internationally. Getting the name out there, that would be fantastic. What my role will be? Well, it’ll be whatever it needs to be. Whatever I can do, I will do.
Finally we can’t not mention Christmas, what are your favourite things about Christmas and how does a Welsh Christmas compare to a Los Angeles one?
Well, you know now it’s being with the children and seeing it through their eyes. I absolutely love Christmas. My mum goes so over the top with Christmas decorations and always has since I was a kid, so I love that. I love everything about it. I love Christmas telly, I love listening to Christmas music. The whole thing! And now with the kids, it’s just amazing. Compared to Los Angeles? Well, I haven’t had that many American ones. I don’t like being away from Wales at Christmas time. I’ve tried to make sure that I’m not away, so it’s only been a handful of times...but it’s no good man (laughs). It’s very poor when you’re not in Wales (laughs). It’s not right having hot weather. It needs to be cold and wet and miserable and damp, and Wales always delivers and comes up trumps in that respect.
