2019 looks set to be an exciting and brave new year for Welsh theatre. Fedor Tot checks the health of Welsh theatre today and looks back over the years to see how it’s evolved.
Welsh theatre is certainly in an interesting place at the moment. Last year had more than a few controversies. An open letter criticising National Theatre Wales, signed first by 40 playwrights and then 200 actors, that appeared in September 2018 generated a wide-ranging debate as to what Welsh theatre is and what it means. The letter called for NTW to do more to promote Welsh or Welsh-based talent, highlighting a dearth of such in many of the productions it ran in 2018, and for there to be more theatrical productions period.
In this case, NTW seemed to be willing to listen to the criticism and opened up a dialogue with the writers – a case that can’t necessarily be said of the controversy around the Wales Theatre Awards in 2018 when The Golden Dragon, an opera which featured white actors in Asian roles and was accused of ‘yellowface’, was nominated at the awards. The resurfacing of that controversy led to their cancellation this year. In a relatively small theatre scene, two big arguments in a year is pretty hefty.
But moving beyond that, there’s a lot to be hopeful for in Welsh theatre. Twenty years ago, neither National Theatre Wales nor its Welsh-language counterpart Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru existed, and funding for Welsh theatre was, well, not much.
There has long been a historic energy around Welsh theatre, from the pioneering site-specific work of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and Brith Gof (whose practices have influenced NTW’s own; the co-director of the aforementioned companies, Mike Pearson, has gone on to direct and contribute to several of NTW’s most acclaimed pieces such as The Persians and the Storm cylce) to the work of Ed Thomas and contemporaries in the late 1980s and 90s, who brought Welsh stories out of Wales and to a wider arena.
If all the various countries and regions of the UK – not just Wales, but also Scotland and arguably even northern England – are constantly having to deal with London vacuuming up talent, this is as fine a time as any to push that centre of gravity away from the capital and towards other points of the UK. It’s ridiculous the amount of talent in this country that gets routinely ignored by mainstream media simply because its base isn’t within the M25, although there are a few journalists in the major papers who make that effort – Lyn Gardner at The Guardian was a prime case-in-point, until her contract was cancelled.
The Sherman Theatre’s audiences have bumped up 35% in the last few years with a slew of awards in its wake, including an Olivier Award for Killology. We have smaller fare such as The Other Room, and further afield a network of regional theatres; and in between all of that a multitude of exciting theatre companies.
In these pretty rum times for the creative industries, with less money year-on-year after nearly a decade of austerity (and who knows, after a no-deal Brexit, there may not even be a functioning civilisation to produce theatre for), it’s actually pretty heartening to see how much blood and guts and hard work is still taking place in Welsh theatre.
There seems to be a desire amongst Welsh theatre makers to tell specifically ‘Welsh’ stories, the kind that could only exist in Wales – recent productions that come to mind include Exodus and Iphigenia In Splott, in a way that doesn’t seem to occur for film, despite the frequent use of Wales as a centre for film and TV production.
A recent case-in-point would be Sex Education, the recent Netflix series which was mostly filmed in Caerleon and Monmouthshire, but where all vestiges of Welshness (or even British-ness) were ignored in favour of a generic American-ness designed to appeal to all-comers. But specificity is what gives stories their universal kick, and this is something Welsh theatre has in spades.
These are stories that taste Welsh and could only have come out of the minds of people who have set up home here and live day-to-day. I wonder how much mayhem some Welsh writers could wreak on the film and TV landscape, were they given carte blanche to shoot from the hip.
Sometimes, the more you talk about a ‘national’ identity, the less you can actually define what it is – you just know something is Welsh when you see it. You can look at the Welsh theatre scene, and you can definitely say it is Welsh. For all the many problems the Welsh creative industries face, that’s something worthwhile holding onto.