Review: OUR TOWN, Rose Theatre Kingston
Photo credit: Helen Murray
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a clever choice for the Welsh National Theatre’s first production. It’s a fine play which is not seen as often as it should be, and can absorb all kinds of directorial choices without losing its essential strength and emotional heft. It also provides a central role eminently suited to WNT Artistic Director Michael Sheen. It’s a play that uses deceptively simple language to deal with serious and important concepts.
Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is a kind of anywhere town – anywhere that is where not much happens except people being born, marrying and dying: which is Wilder’s point, of course. In this production, Grover’s Corners (the R’s very much rolled here) is an amalgam of New Hampshire and rural Wales, underlying the essential sameness about both places in the dates in which the play is set, between 1901 and 1913. The pace of change and the great turmoil ahead in the Great War are common to both places, and the play needs little amendment to enable this change, and to great effect.
Francesca Goodridge’s direction is clear and coherent, emphasising these life stories and their universality. In a strong creative team, the work of composer and musical director Dyfan Jones and movement director Jess Williams is superb. The choral and instrumental music is by turns emotive and enriching, although just occasionally we lose some of the spoken text when it is accompanied by music. The movement, using planks and ladders, and sparing but convincing mime, is quite simply stunning. Some of the audience will never look at a church chair again without thinking of it as an ice cream dispenser!
The large (Welsh) cast of 18 are, without exception, versatile and wholly convincing, able to fill in character detail within the shortest of cameos. Among those to catch the eye in particular are Alfie Llewellyn as a paperboy and his brother, Christina Modestu as the garrulous Mrs Soames, unchanged by death, and Rhys Warrington as the tragic Simon Stimson, here given a little more backstory than is made overt in the script.
In the guiding role of the Stage Manager, Michael Sheen is in turn amusing and admonishing, reminding us all, at times of elation, that nothing lasts and, as he says “Whoosh – and you’re 70”. It’s an ideal role for him as Artistic Director of the company he has founded – his remarks to the audience are as much from that perspective as that of a narrator in 1901.
As the two mothers at the centre of the play, touching portrayals by Sian Reese-Williams and Nia Roberts entirely convince, and their performances are matched by those playing their families. The central if doomed couple, yearning Emily and stoic George, are played with quiet confidence and truth by Yasmin Özdemir and, in his professional debut, Peter Devlin.
Originally a three-act play, the current demand for a single interval leads to a long first half, but this is acceptable in a production as powerful as this. Returning for the short but devastating third act is all the more powerful since the dead are in place when we return to the theatre. Cleverly, too, the glimpse given to Emily of how things looked when she was alive is marked by the use of real props and snow, rather than the mimed sequences of real life. The powerful strangeness of that third act is further enhanced by the final image of these people from the past becoming stars in the sky.
This is a stunning beginning for the Welsh National Theatre and testimony to the power of a generation of Welsh actors. Let us hope they make the journey into England regularly, in addition to their vital work in Wales.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Chris Abbott
Our Town plays at Rose Theatre Kingston until 28 March, with further info here.
