Thornton Wilder’s classic American play is transposed for the inaugural production of National Theatre Wales. The result is heartfelt, though its emotional bite can feel uncertain
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 National Theatre Wales, which Michael Sheen has heroically championed, transposes the American backwater to Wales.
But Wilder’s play, premiering in the inter-war 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.
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