theartsdesk in Cardiff: Birth of a National Theatre

All of Wales is a stage. At last.

From seat 17 of Row 8, Block M35, Stair 14, Level 4, in a gathering of 75,000 spectators, almost all of them Welsh, it’s difficult to argue with the idea that Wales already has a national theatre. It’s called the Millennium Stadium (picture below). Just before kick-off yesterday afternoon, from my high-altitude perch, I looked across to the distant tunnel opposite. Its jaws belched fire and smoke and, in due course, a pumped-up team in red shirts. Their entry was greeted by a dozen gas-powered jet flames dotted around the touchline, spurting up towards the stadium roof.

Tim Davies, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea

Cadet: Running at Preston (DVD installation): 'the artist runs in circles, filming the poppies, the grey uniforms, and gold lettering on the plinth'

'Between a Rock and a Hard Place'

Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch taste-makers, and often, attention comes from abroad. In Wales, of course, it’s a different story: he was Gold Medal winner in the 2003 National Eisteddfod, and on the other hand the only British artist shortlisted for the prestigious international Artes Mundi prize in 2004. Davies’ major solo show at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in his hometown, Swansea, is a thoughtful, exciting collection of mixed media projects linked, sometimes obviously, sometimes obscurely, always lyrically, to the shared title.

Meeting Katherine Jenkins

MEETING KATHERINE JENKINS Revisit the newly anointed OBE's interview with the late Robert Sandall

The Welsh popular soprano discusses drugs, singing to troops in Helmand and cracking the pop market

It’s pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive, and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century.

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