Mapping the Nation: the National Theatre Wales journey so far…

The National Theatre Wales's production of The Persians tells us much about the modern world

WHAT DO Blackwood Miners Institute, Swansea’s old library, Cardiff’s New Theatre, the entire town of Barmouth, Prestatyn seafront, and the Sennybridge military range have in common? Apart from the fact that they are all in Wales, these disparate locations would appear to share very little, but they have all been used as venues for productions in National Theatre Wales’ first season, which has – with the successful staging of Europe’s oldest surviving drama, Aeschylus’ The Persians – now reached its halfway point.

Instituted last year by the Welsh Assembly Government and Arts Council for Wales, NTW is a landmark company that ‘aims to be innovative, engaged and international’. Not being a building-based company has freed NTW from the internecine wrangling that would certainly have dogged the building of a ‘national theatre’ in a particular place, with all the attendant politicking and petty jealousy which mars so much of public life in Wales. Instead, the company has been able to use its £3m grant to focus on producing first-rate work that deliberately attempts to engage with communities in all corners of the country.

Indeed, the project of NTW’s first year programme is to theatrically ‘map’ the nation; with shows to come from Newport to Snowdonia and from Butetown to Milford Haven, no one could argue that NTW hasn’t covered the ground. But what is even more impressive about the scope and ambition of this opening year-long season is the way it is also an attempt to map the landscape of contemporary European theatre. Culminating next Easter weekend with an epic three-day community Passion play in Port Talbot, directed by and starring Michael Sheen, NTW has chosen partner organisations from home and abroad, ranging from Berlin’s reality theatre company Rimini Protokoll and London-based ‘pervasive games’ pioneers Hide and Seek to the Welsh National Opera and Sherman Cymru. Again, the choices are inclusive, politically astute, and – most importantly – theatrically exciting.

Given the outward-looking confidence and bold choices for its opening season, it is perhaps surprising that the whole programme kicked off with A Good Night Out In The Valleys, a fairly traditional piece of theatre staged at Blackwood Miners Institute, back in March. The evening began with one of Wales’ best-known comic actors, Boyd Clack, donning a giant yellow chicken suit and organizing a raffle. Based on real stories that had been collected by writer Alan Harris from local communities across the valleys (the show also had short stints at Blaengarw, Pontardawe, Bedwas and Aberdare), the play touched on many well-worn themes of working-class Welsh life, but it was clear that the community engagement aspect of NTW’s mission was hugely successful in those areas that are, after all, the English-speaking heartlands of Wales.

This approach is intrinsic to be the venture. As artistic director John McGrath said, in an interview with the Guardian:

“We couldn’t do it without [local communities] … we wouldn’t want to do it without them”

If there was an understandable element of crowd-pleasing to the warmth and humour of the first show, which was exactly what it said on the programme, NTW’s second show Shelf Life, staged in Swansea’s now-empty old library, certainly took some risks. A collaboration between Volcano, known for their physical theatre, and the Welsh National Opera, this promenade piece introduced audiences to the grand old reading room, a darkly atmospheric space which actually stole the show from the actors. At times a bewildering multi-sensory experience, the piece served as a eulogy for the library in the digital age, ending with the idea that in the age of the internet we are all now librarians.

Next came the most traditional of the plays staged by NTW thus far, remarkable mainly because of its importance in theatrical history and its surprisingly strong links to Wales. The Devil Inside Him was written in 1948 by an eighteen year-old John Osborne and set near Swansea. Interesting as a pre-cursor to his ground-breaking Look Back In Anger, the play gives insight not only into the development of Osborne as a playwright but also the mores of mid-twentieth century south Wales, still dominated by a repressive chapel tradition. The protagonist Huw Prosser, in a fantastically intense performance by Iwan Rheon, foreshadows not just Jimmy Porter, Osborne’s most famous ‘angry young man’, but the likes of Holden Caulfield and the ‘rise of the teenager’ which in many ways shaped the decades to come. In the same way that Parthian’s WAG-assisted Library of Wales series has reclaimed lost classics of Welsh writing in English under the editorship of Dai Smith (Gwyn Thomas’ The Dark Philosophers is being staged by NTW at Newport’s Riverfront in November), this event was a major coup for theatre in Wales even if it was the only show in the programme so far not to have completely sold out its run.

Both geographically and theatrically NTW could not have travelled much further from the proscenium arch of Cardiff’s New Theatre to the Mountain, Sand and Sea of Barmouth on the northern stretch of the west Wales coast for the June leg of the NTW tour. Marc Rees’ playful theatrical ‘excavation’ of the town was an experimental three-hour excursion, a walk around the town, up a mountain and along the beach. Although this was a collection of theatrical fragments that sometimes failed to make a whole, this day out at the seaside was perhaps the most memorable and thought-provoking of all the productions so far. The fun – and frustration – was in attempting to connect what we had seen with the snippets of information we had been given about the town and with each other.

The experimentation with participatory forms of theatre – and the practice of sending audiences home with sand in their socks – continued through NTW’s summer season with The Beach, an outdoor gaming experience in which teams of participants completed various challenges to bring back ‘the missing generation’ to Prestatyn. Again, this provided a thoroughly engaging experience that was both fun and thought-provoking. A photographic and audio-visual record of proceedings quickly appeared on the NTW’s social network, a community area of their website which has underpinned much of the first-year programme and underlined the company’s stated commitment to keep audiences and communities involved.

Which brings us to The Persians, certainly for me the highlight of the NTW journey so far. Mike Pearson, who used to lead site-specific company Brith Gof, has produced a truly groundbreaking new version of the Western world’s oldest play, based on Kaite O’Reilly’s excellent new translation of a play first performed in Athens in 472BC. Telling the story of the Greeks’ stunning victory over the might of Persia from the point of view of the defeated, Aeschylus’ drama is given heightened new resonances through the choice of Cilieni – normally out of bounds on the Brecon Beacons military range – as the performance location.

Like all truly great drama, The Persians speaks not just for then or now, but for all time. Its central message about the futility and tragedy of war is universal. For 10 days, even with the international festival continuing in Edinburgh, the eyes of the theatrical world are on Wales. Through bravery and ambition, NTW are putting Wales on the map. The central tenets that have underpinned their success so far – community engagement, artistic experimentation, geographical diversity – have produced rich rewards. As we look forward to the next series of shows, including a Gary Owen piece concerned with the Bridgend suicides, an investigation into Snowdonian weather and a taxi ride through Butetown to the Coal Exchange, other artforms and organisations in Wales would do well to take note of the NTW model.

This is theatre of the people by the people for the people.