The Gospel of Us is a film about remembering. It is based on and was filmed at The Passion of Port Talbot, Michael Sheen’s triumphant theatre-event that took over his home town in south Wales to retell the Easter story this time last year. Writer Owen Sheers has novelised The Passion as The Gospel of Us.
The Queen's given everyone an extra bank holiday, so while you rest up over the Easter holidays, start planning your next downtime with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide for the summer. We have headline listings and links for all the UK festivals this year, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way.
Before I came to what I was surprised to discover is a fifth album from hard-rock six-piece Lostprophets, there were two things I knew about the band: firstly, that they are Welsh; and secondly, that they showed up in magazines like Kerrang! a lot back when I was in high school.
Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as their stage for Owen Sheer’s The Passion last Easter. Setting themselves the challenge of producing 12 productions in their first 12 months, this building-less company have somehow turned a modest (not to say meagre) £1 million a year subsidy into a living, risk-taking tradition of national theatre.
There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-factly; “it’s just a trade; it’s not a magical world. You have to ask me to do things.”
In a year of centenary celebrations paying homage to Captain Scott and the men who accompanied him to Antarctica at the end of the Edwardian age, two exhibitions in London have assumed pride of place. The Natural History Museum places a spotlight on the scientific achievements of the Terra Nova expedition. At the Queen’s Gallery two photographic archives capture with remarkable immediacy the sheer splendour of the polar regions.
Popular operatic love stories by Puccini, Wagner and Mozart dominate the regional scene in 2012, but key talents like producer Tim Albery in Leeds, Lothar Koenigs in Cardiff and David McVicar in Glasgow all promise significant stage experiences.
Siân Phillips (b 1933) belongs to a remarkable generation of British actresses. They include Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright and Sheila Hancock. Although just as indomitable a presence on stage and screen, Phillips is set apart from them not only by dint of her Welshness – Welsh was her mother language as a child – but also by the curious shape of her career.
The Wye valley is famous for its scenery and coach parties: Symonds Yat, Tintern Abbey, Goodrich Castle, salmon fishing, leaves in autumn etc. etc. But in mid-winter all that is dead. Instead, this month as for the past dozen or so Januaries, the woods and waters will echo to the sound of chamber music, played by some of the most brilliant young musicians in the country.
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.