[title]
★★★★
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie and the electric chair. So on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre.
But never fear: the whole thing manages to be so exuberantly Welsh that you’ll soon forget the town of Grover’s Corners is supposed to be somewhere in New Hampshire. Francesca Goodridge’s production does Welshify a few details: a couple of incidental place name changes, a couple of hymns. But for the most part the difference is that every cast member not only has a chunky Welsh accent – as the omniscient Stage Manager, Sheen finds a whole new layer of fruitiness in his Rs – but there’s also a warmth and heartiness to their deliveries that softens (and maybe sentimentalises) a strange play that’s often intentionally served up cold and dry.
For its more conventional first two acts, Sheen’s stomach padded Stage Manager is a twinkle-eyed, avuncular guide to life in Grover’s Corners at the turn of the twentieth century as we meet the townsfolk and eventually watch the courtship and then wedding of Emily Webb (Yasemin Özdemir) and George Gibbs (Peter Devlin). Traditionally the play is performed on a bare stage, without props but Goodridge’s production uses staging based around Jess Williams’ dynamic, upbeat movement and the lifting, placing, twirling etc of various wooden boards and props.
Amping up the boisterous charm does feel like it changes Our Town: it conceals the cerebral weirdness at its heart. But if it loses a little something in the head, it gains a little something in the heart. And Sheen is a delightful centre to it all, leaning into his status as the nation’s favourite twinkly-eyed uncle and just doing a generally spectacular job of pronouncing ‘Grover’s Corners’ as if it were some centuries old Welsh word (‘Grrrrrrrohvahs Corrrrrrnahs’).
The warmth doesn’t entirely go away for the haunting final act, in which the minutiae of village life is traded for something much stranger, as the dead of the town dispassionately observe a funeral and welcome a deceased townsperson into a world beyond human concerns. Often this section is properly weird and unsettling: full Beckettian freakiness. Goodridge’s take is gentler, the dead not quite so inhuman, the void not quite so . Sheen’s Stage Manager is solemn but kind and the show ends in a lovely constellation of twinkling torches.
Having a Welsh cast doesn’t automatically make a play jollier. The change in tone is a choice, and a choice surely designed to reflect fondly on Wales and Welsh community. There will be purists who might say this is sentimentalising a postmodern masterpiece. But I’d say Our Town can take it. And it’s impressive and undeniable that the Welsh National Theatre has stamped itself on a classic with its very first production. Wales is lucky to have Michael Sheen, who has turned his back on Hollywood to launch his new theatre company. And if the WNT productions keep transferring this way, then we’re lucky to have him too.
Rose Theatre Kingston, now until Mar 28.