Steel yourself for fragmented vignettes fused by molten disbelief
Theatre We’re Still Here Byass Works, Port Talbot
★★★★★
Six years ago, the actor Michael Sheen made a very public homecoming to Port Talbot, presiding over The Passion – a vision of Christ (Sheen) undergoing crucifixion and resurrection amid the highways and byways of modern-day Wales. It turned the whole town into a performance space. And often it looked as if the entire population had turned out to bear witness.
Anything felt possible that Easter: there was hope in the air, a miraculous sense of belonging. But now National Theatre Wales have returned to the scene of their greatest triumph (this time under the new artistic directorship of Kully Thiarai) to confront the foreboding that has settled on the place, in tandem with site-specific company Common Wealth. Port Talbot’s towering steel works – a phenomenon in the Sixties, and still the largest works in the UK – face an uncertain future. Owners Tata abandoned a proposed sell-off last year (which brought the works into the news), but with China’s steel-dumping continuing, the omens aren’t good. What would happen to Port Talbot if this industrial titan, still employing thousands, were to fall foul of globalisation to a fatal extent?
The answer, as directed by Evie Manning and Rhiannon White using professionals and locals, and scripted by Welsh playwright Rachel Trezise – “inspired by conversations with steelworkers, union members and the wider community” – isn’t comforting. Set amid the melancholy splendour of the disused Byass Works, a short cab ride from the station, this impressionistic series of fragmented vignettes fused together by an undercurrent of molten disbelief invites visitors to wander through a warehouse full of dereliction, and slag heaps arranged like funeral pyres.
Imagine Under Milk Wood drained of all sense of communal concord, with just a bitter lyricism remaining: steelworkers sit slumped in hard-hats and blue overclothes, singing to themselves; the names of the redundant are intoned as if at a requiem mass; there’s a monologue about what it’s like to be on the dole, day after grinding day.
There are shifts in tempo and focus – a handful of youths scurry about, delivering cryptic orations about far-flung elsewheres also suffering shutdowns, offsetting the visions of old, tired masculinity.
We get a sense of collective action near the end, as workers, fretting about their pensions, quarrel at a meeting with union reps, and something like defiance rears up.
But the dominant note – assisted by ominous clankings and eerie whistlings – is of things falling apart. Corbyn would make a beeline here. And he’d be right to.
What is to be done?
Until Sept 30. Tickets: 029 2037 1689; nationaltheatrewales.org