A revival of Thornton Wilder’s great American play about a provincial town, north of New York, might have carried strong state-of-the-nation resonances at this dark, Trumpian juncture. So it initially seems counterintuitive that this inaugural show for the new Welsh National Theatre, which Michael Sheen has heroically championed, transposes the US backwater to Wales.
But Wilder’s play, premiering in the interwar years, in 1938, is more eternal than political, dramatising a close-knit community navigating life, love and death. And the transposition is convincing here, in spirit, encapsulating the lilt of its Welshness, noisier, more playful and lyrical than the original, especially in its glowing visual imagination and movement design by Jess Williams as well as its emotional lighting by Ryan Joseph Stafford.
Comprising three acts and emphatically aware of its theatricality, the drama’s “stage manager”, played by Sheen, takes us to one morning in 1901 when we see the early bud of romance between young George Gibbs (Peter Devlin) and Emily Webb (Yasemin Özdemir). Three years later, that has bloomed into marriage. The final act jumps to the town’s cemetery, and an untimely death, in 1913. The stage manager casts his narrative eye over the town, describing, ruminating, introducing scenes before interrupting them and stepping in to play various characters too. Sheen, with waistcoat and watch-chain, is in his element, mixing mischievousness, earnestness and bathos.
The set of this play is traditionally empty, filled mainly with the stage manager’s description of it, but Hayley Grindle’s design is well arranged so that its emptiness engages our imaginations while using props with economy, such as the wooden planks that make up the edifice of the town, that are reused in expressionist ways.
It is a handsome production overall, filled with abundant physicality and some moments spark with magic, but there are also some broader inconsistencies. While the production feels Welsh in spirit and look – there is period costume, Welsh accents and names – its reference points are still prevailing American. This is a town made up of mostly Republicans, there are mentions of New Hampshire, the US constitution, the Louisiana Purchase and high school. This lends the production an unreal quality, unhinged from its original geography but also locked into it. Does the long strip of azure sky in the backdrop belong to the valleys or the US mountains? You yearn for “more” Welshness in its fibre.
In a production directed by Francesca Goodridge, with Russell T Davies as creative associate, the setting of Grover’s Corners contains the romance and nostalgia of a bygone community, not unlike like Dylan Thomas’s fishing village of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood, which Sheen starred in at the National Theatre (Thomas was, in fact, said to have known Wilder and this play). But the first two acts come without Thomas’s deft play of darkness and light, the romantic and bitterly tragic. There is too much light and warmth, and not enough tension or conflict, so that this community, until the final, shortest act, seems like The Waltons in south Wales.
When the darkness comes, it brings a ghostly scene reminiscent of A Christmas Carol. The dead, as they talk to each other, sound like Greek gods, impervious to human vulnerability and suffering. It’s an interesting interpretation but emotionally distancing.
Grover’s Corners is a nice town, we are told, though no one remarkable ever came out of it, and you assume this might be a failing: that it throttles anything out of the ordinary. The production’s treatment of the town drunk, Simon (Rhys Warrington), makes just that point through a fantastically deft piece of mime that insinuates him as a gay man trapped by small-town mores.
But its “ordinariness” carries a moral lesson and that is to relish the gloriously quotidian moments in life. It’s sentimental, like a version of It’s a Wonderful Life, but without the sense of ecstatic uplift at the end. “You’re 21, you’re 22, and whack, you’re 70,” reflects the narrator. It’s finger-wagging in its message, but it works. Look up, drink in ordinary life, because it goes too fast. You have been warned.
