The Stage

National Theatre Wales unveils inaugural season

Published Thursday 5 November 2009 at 18:03 by Lalayn Baluch

The National Theatre Wales, the country’s new English language theatre company, has announced its inaugural season comprising a series of 13 site-specific works that will “theatrically map Wales”.

Launching in March 2010 and running until 2011, the company – which is not building-based – will stage a different show every month in urban and rural locations around the country.

The programme will feature A Good Night in the Valleys, based on the stories of mining communities, a partnership with Volcano Theatre and the Welsh National Opera called Shelf Life, and the world premiere of a recently discovered John Osborne play entitled The Devil Inside Him.

Theatregoers will be led on a tour of the seaside town of Barmouth in For Mountain, Sand and Sea, outdoor show The Beaches of North Wales will aim to appeal to the “Playstation generation”, and a new version of Aeschylus’ The Persians will be staged in the Brecon Beacons Military Range.

The season was announced today during a launch in Cardiff, which was also streamed live online.

Speaking to The Stage, NTW artistic director John E McGrath said: “We looked at our name National Theatre, what does that mean? It can mean a big building, but really what it means is theatre for everyone in the nation.

“We wanted to take that literally, and take theatre to everyone. Rather than it just being a touring show at different venues, we wanted to look at the spaces and places we would be working in and make something very special.”

The NTW receives £1.25 million annually from the Arts Council of Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government.

It has also received £120,000 from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to appoint regional ‘ambassadors’, who will aim to encourage engagement with the company.

“This is a brilliant opportunity to get an articulation and expression of our society. I think there were initially doubters who asked ‘where are the actors, the venues, the writers?’ But we believed that there was a sufficient theatre ecology existing to allow us to do this,” said Dai Smith, chair of Arts Council of Wales.

“We don’t traditionally have a bourgeois theatregoing audience in Wales – but this programme addresses that. We will take theatre to you, we won’t even call it theatre if you don’t want, we will call it a good night out, and we will tell your stories with you and for you.”

The line-up will also feature a new work set in Bridgend – the Welsh town brought into the public eye following a series of suicides by young people – a production based on the stories of author Glyn Thomas, and a show inspired by weather samples collected from Snowdonia.

The season will culminate in a devised piece entitled Soul Exchange, the first UK production by Berlin-based company Rimini Protokoll, NoFit State Circus and Torch Theatre’s collaboration Mundo Paralelo, and Michael Sheen’s Passion.