Port Talbot
The once a decade passion play by the German town of Oberammergau may be the most famed around the world, but it's hard to believe any version can have the heart and soul of Port Talbot's one-off, multi-platform production, which played out over the Easter weekend. Co-directed by and starring the Welsh town's favourite son, Michael Sheen, this spectacle of angels on fiery bicycles, ghosts, snipers perched on the roof of the shopping centre, and shrines to lost futures was so much more than just an epic piece of street theatre.
Hewn with tenderness from the memories of locals, and largely performed by them ? with a little help from a fine band of professional Welsh actors, and interventions from local heroes such as Paul Potts and the Manic Street Preachers ? this final production in National Theatre Wales's launch season, created in collaboration with Wildworks, was like watching a town discovering its voice through a shared act of creation. Fact and fiction, myth and memory, rumour and reality, even the living and the dead stalk side by side. I'm prepared to bet that over the last three days, Port Talbot was one of the happiest places on Earth.
Beginning on Friday on Aberavon beach, Owen Sheers's story tells of a town in thrall to a sinister and heartless corporation, ICU, who puts profit before people in its quest to plunder the town's resources. But when the Company Man arrives on the beach to make an announcement and a suicide bomber makes a move, catastrophe is only averted by the intervention of a softly spoken loner with no memory. He is later revealed as the Teacher (Sheen), a local man who 40 days earlier disappeared but who has now returned. As he gathers followers around him and becomes a focus for the Resistance, the Teacher is perceived by ICU as a danger who must be removed at all costs.
The Gospel of St Mark is the template, but everything is given a neat twist. The Last Supper takes place in the Seaside Social Club, the garden of Gethsemane is a patch of housing estate grass, God the Father becomes a roofer who knows that sometimes one slate must be sacrificed to save a whole house. The hand of Wildwork's visionary Bill Mitchell is everywhere in a show that may be on a vast scale but it understands that it is not the grand narratives but the small stories of individuals that glue the theatre and community together, and it rewards its audience's patience with a gift. This production is transforming and uplifting, and Port Talbot's future starts the very second The Passion ends.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/apr/24/the-passion-port-talbot-review
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