| Critical Acclaim Continues |
Welsh National Theatre |
| Our Town- Critical Compilation , Rose Theatre London , April 14, 2026 |
One of the first case studies of the impact of digital communications was carried out in India. It reported from Kerala and the dramatic impact that open information had for the fisherman of Cochin.Arts writers do not usually seek out the open information that the Internet allows. Nonetheless, a theatre production's fortunes are carried out in a more open view than in prior times. The illustration is from the Rose Theatre, just a Wednesday night, 11th March, mid-run. On that and other nights that week the audiences looked good. A success on all counts is to be shouted about. A request to the national company as to audience numbers received neither response nor acknowledgement. The reviews from the venues of Wales had been good. So too said the critics when “Our Town” moved to its co-producing venue, the Rose Theatre in Kingston. * * * * The Observer was there: “Our Town – Michael Sheen’s vision for Welsh theatre. The Swansea hero brings a touch of magic to the first production by his new stage venture – with a joyous play about extraordinary happenings in an ordinary town. “...The US playwright Thornton Wilder’s 1938 work is a clever choice with which to start. It is welcoming; it celebrates the intermeshing of lives and the theatre’s ability to conjure this. Evoking a small town with a jostle of characters, fragmentary scenes, comedy and dark shadows, it has much in common with Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas is never far away in Swansea; round the corner from the Grand is a pub named after his silver-tongued clergyman, Eli Jenkins. Sheen, in the role of a stage manager, gets a rumble of appreciation as soon as he appears in waistcoat and whiskers “Sheen has used his celebrity like a lightning rod to bring in audiences and channel warmth on to the stage. In the role of a stage manager, who steers the audience through the action, he gets a rumble of appreciation as soon as he appears in waistcoat and whiskers. Like Burton in the film adaptation of Thomas’s drama, he is a narrator who murmurs comfortingly and ushers in chill winds; Wilder appeared in the part himself for a couple of weeks on Broadway. He magics existences from nothing; when he clicks his fingers the lights go down. “Francesca Goodridge’s expansive production brings Welsh accents and resonant Welsh hymns to Wilder’s play, which is set in New Hampshire in the early years of the 20th century: the unexpected mixture proves intriguing rather than disconcerting. These characters travel well. As always, the more detailed, the more universal. “The drama’s rosy first half, flirting with sentimentality, has one single developing thread – of a teenage romance – but largely presents warm wisps of everyday life: a newspaper boy delivering papers and a doctor delivering twins; a drunk choirmaster – everyone knows and everyone pretends not to tattle about him – who weaves sadly across the boards; a shopkeeper dispensing strawberry sodas. The smell of heliotrope drifts from one garden, and one nose, to another. In a dramatic shift of mood after the interval, death has claimed some vital characters. Their ghosts, perched high on unreachable ladders, look down on their friends and families, again summoning memories of Under Milk Wood, where one of the most sensuous voices is that of a dead woman. “Our town is, says one citizen, “very ordinary”. The point of the play is to show how particular it is to each resident, and how the residents depend on each other. Hayley Grindle’s design beautifully enables this: the cast are seen making their houses, streets and civic buildings. Planks of wood become doorways, tables, the cross of a church, the rails for trains, whose whistles sound from time to time like a call from the wild. I wish only that chairs were not brandished in the air – a cliche that should be at least temporarily retired; waived, not waved. “Jess Williams’s work as movement director is crucial to the sense of civic interdependence: the 18-strong cast weave across the stage – fluidly but not over-balletically – as if they were making a cat’s cradle with their activity. Equally important is Ryan Joseph Stafford’s lighting design, its initial radiance the more striking because it is fringed by darkness, against which characters first glow, and to which they eventually return. “Wilder’s script sometimes lumbers. Yet though it is old-fashioned in its explicitness, it is timely. In pleading with its audience to appreciate taken-for-granted moments – giving significance to everyday gestures and phrases in the way they do in attending to a good play – this could be called a lesson in mindfulness. In other words, art. Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review which can be read by subscription at: https://observer.co.uk/culture/theatre/article/our-town-michael-sheens-vision-for-welsh-theatre-review * * * * The Standard was there: “He ambles on from stage left, twinkly in a tweed suit and grizzled beard: Michael Sheen, who has brought this new Welsh National Theatre company into being by his will and star power, and who hunkers into the central role of Thornton Wilder’s hymn to small-town life (and death) as if it was written for him. “This play from 1938, a stalwart of the American canon, has been given a light, Cambrian makeover. We’re still in New Hampshire in the first decades of the 20th century, but the accents, the songs and the names of the surrounding mountains are all Welsh. The depiction of the arc of lives lived in a tight community works just as well. This is the epitome of that stock phrase — a warm hug of a show. “Yes, of course it’s sentimental, but it’s also both a tightly written piece of drama and a celebration of the rough magic of theatre. Sheen’s character is the Stage Manager, our master of ceremonies for a shared journey. His first act is to remove the Ghost Light — the lamp left on a stage, for reasons of “safety and superstition” as Wikipedia puts it, when there are no actors or audience present. “Immediately after that, director Francesca Goodridge maps out the dawn contours of the town of Grovers Corners with a few beautifully deft strokes. The cast rearrange a series of bare planks to form the crucifixes of the local churches, the steps of the town hall, shop counters, and front doors. Hands sprout through wheeled trolleys of upstanding grass to suggest the different blooms in well-tended flowerbeds. Four actors sway in unison to suggest a cow lumbering down Main Street. “The first act is set in 1901, when doctor’s son George Gibbs and newspaperman’s daughter Emily Webb are teenagers, with her helping him solve algebra problems from her moonlit bedroom window; the second is in 1904, when they get married. The third act, set in 1913, deals with loss and the onset of the modern world. Fords are replacing horses in the streets, and there’s a larger global calamity looming over the domestic one “The play harks back to the formative stories America used to tell itself, and it is suffused by wonder at the brief, fragile miracle of existence. You could pick out any number of lines that express this. “You’ve got to love life to have life,” and vice versa, the Stage Manager puts it at one point. At another: “Every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.” Then, in the blink of an eye, “whoosh, you’re 70, and the white-haired lady by your side has eaten over 50,000 meals. With you!” “Peter Devlin has a strapping, open-faced vigour as George that reminded me of the young Nicholas Hoult. Yasemin Özdemir is wry and spry as the clever and insightful Emily. If we invest in their growing romance, it’s partly down to the depiction of their parents’ long marriages, and particularly the camaraderie of the two mothers, played by Sian Reese-Williams and Nia Roberts. “There’s a lovely, comic scene where Rhodri Meilir’s Mr Webb flounders through a chat about the facts of married life with his soon-to-be son-in-law. And a hint, very elegantly done, that the troubled alcoholic organist of the Presbyterian church is covertly gay. Grief and the afterlife are movingly evoked in the third act through choric movement and a set of stepladders. Though some characters have greater or lesser importance, this is a true ensemble where every physical body on stage contributes to the texture of the whole. “True, there’s arguably a bit too much syrup and too little salt in the mix. And I suppose you could ask why a new company dedicated to Welsh culture, albeit in English, is doing an American play. (WNT has also mounted a solo show about Richard Burton starring Matthew Rhys; its next production will star Sheen as local hero Owain Glyndŵr.) But Our Town remains a joyful, consoling work about the ties that unite us, with or without a Welsh accent. And god knows there’s a place for that right now. Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review which can be read at: https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/our-town-rose-theatre-kingston-micheal-sheen-b1273588.html |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 60 times There are 6 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
