The launch of the National Theatre of Wales is the final judgement on the National Theatre of Scotland: the blueprint works.

So there’s no home base, and a policy of topographical inclusion and community based projects. Michael Sheen leading his home town’s Passion Play in Port Talbot sounds juicy but one rather shudders at the thought of John Osborne’s “lost” first play; unless it turns out to be half as good as Martin McDonagh’s belatedly produced first play, The Pillowman, of course.

And how ironic is it that the NTW’s artistic director is called John McGrath? The late, great playwright of the same name was in effect a founding father of the Scottish national theatre with his 7:84 touring company in the 1970s.

The previous bidders for running, or indeed forming, the NTW, Michael Bogdanov and Terry Hands, have taken to the hills and we don’t know whether either or both of them will take part.  

Bogdanov is directing mostly abroad, while Hands is hunkered down in Mold with the highly successful Theatr Clwyd he has run for well over ten years now, with every right to be called the National Theatre of Wales in all but name, apparently. Is it hissy fit time, I wonder?

The Welsh won’t agree, but I don’t think the resources and traditions on their doorstep are nearly as rich as were those for the NTS, but we shall see. A full-scale Emlyn Williams revival, anyone?

Meanwhile, it’s all gearing up in Bristol for next week’s big announcemnet at the Old Vic, where artistic director Tom Morris has shown a tactful sense of reconciliation with Andrew Hilton’s Tobacco Factory in the city by inviting them into the hallowed portals for the first time this week.

In truth, their Uncle Vanya is rather pedestrian — clean-limbed, efficient, brisk, but rather pedestrian — but it’s good to see the auditorium inhabited once again, even if half the distinctly geriatric audience at yesterday’s matinee were comfortably comatose and bleeping in the hearing aid department.

It’s a masterstroke, though, to build the stage out beyond the proscenium arch: it complements the Georgian architecture of the horse-shoe auditorium to perfection and re-defines the proper design of the side boxes actually on the playing area. It’s a shame there was no-one sitting in them, it might have livened up the acting a bit.

Tom Morris seems wonderfully alive to the potential of the theatre, and its place in the city, even to its history, though I daresay some of the senior patrons shuddered at his programme note promising a full exploration of all the other spaces in the building.

What other spaces? The scene dock, the green room, the circle bar? Good grief, the whole thing could turn out to be an inland outpost of the “theatre is everywhere” policy of the National Theatre of Wales.

Tom announces his plans next week first in Bristol and the next day in London at the Jerwood Space.  So there are no freebie first-class travel jaunts as proffered by the NTW yesterday in Cardiff. Only trouble is the date of the London announcement:  it’s Friday the thirteenth.  

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.