Why Our Town? When Newport-born thespian Michael Sheen announced last year that Thornton Wilder’s canonised 1938 play would be the inaugural production for his new Welsh National Theatre (an ambitious, self-funded replacement for the recently shuttered National Theatre Wales), it seemed, perhaps, an odd choice. Set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners, Our Town is about as Welsh as corn dogs or Super Bowl Sunday.
And yet, watching Francesca Goodridge’s assured production at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, I’m struck by just how apt a selection this was. Sheen (also the artistic director of the WNT) plays the stage manager, Our Town’s fourth-wall-breaking narrator – a cute metatextual idea in a play that’s already full of them. He waxes lyrical to the audience, then prowls the sidelines as we witness the goings-on in Grover’s Corners, a lot of which concern a teenage love affair between the sweet, oblivious George (Peter Devlin) and the bright but insecure Emily (Yasemin Özdemir).
