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Michael Sheen’s statement of intent for his newly founded national theatre for Wales couldn’t be more clear. The Welsh actor launched the company in January after the demise of National Theatre Wales owing to funding cuts. This week, Sheen announced that one of his first plays will be Owain & Henry, the story of Owain Glyndŵr, who led a 15-year revolt against the English in 1400. Sheen will star as Glyndŵr, adding the last Welshman to have been proclaimed Prince of Wales to a résumé that includes Tony Blair, David Frost and, most recently, another Welsh hero, Aneurin Bevan.
Retelling Shakespeare’s Henry IV from the Welsh perspective was “an act of defiance” and “resistance”, Sheen told BBC Four’s Front Row, saying that he hoped the play would spark national conversations, not least about his country’s relationship with England. Sheen returned his OBE in 2017, calling for an end to the practice of keeping the title of Prince of Wales in the English royal family.
On a less epic yet equally ambitious scale, the new theatre will also stage Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, described by Edward Albee as “the greatest American play ever written”. It will be relocated to the Welsh valleys, with Sheen in the central role of the stage manager. As a celebration of small-town lives, Wilder’s 1930s Pulitzer prize winner might be a precursor to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
National Theatre Wales was just one casualty of a decade of austerity. Theatr Cymru, the touring Welsh language company, survives, but many of Wales’s cultural institutions are on the verge of collapse due to lack of funding – some literally. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall (home to the Welsh Proms) has been silent since 2023, and the National Museum of Wales, where staff had to remove paintings when it rained because its roof leaked so badly, temporarily closed for emergency repairs in February. Welsh National Opera has been forced to cut performances and jobs. Cardiff University is closing its prestigious school of music. The Books Council of Wales is publishing fewer Welsh-language books. The list goes on.
Devolution was meant to safeguard Wales’s culture, but spending on cultural services is the lowest in Europe, bar Greece. A nation is its culture. Recent research confirms that the arts are good for us, reducing loneliness and boosting mental health. With an ageing population and rising poverty, the Welsh government has heavy budgetary demands, but in February it announced an additional £4.4m a year to support the cultural sectors. At last the Senedd is listening.
If anyone can resurrect Wales’s creative spirit it is Sheen. As part of the National Theatre Wales’s launch season back in 2011, he transformed his home town of Port Talbot into the stage for a 72-hour performance of The Passion over the Easter weekend. More than 100 local amateurs took part. It was “like watching a town discovering its voice through a shared act of creation”, according to the Guardian review. Now Sheen is attempting to do the same for the whole country.
Wales has a new national hero. But it shouldn’t be down to Hollywood stars to paper over the cracks with their own money. It is not a long-term solution. Sheen’s most recent philanthropic venture was writing off £1m of debt for 900 people in south Wales for £100,000, but even his pockets aren’t deep enough to undo a decade of underfunding. He can, however, help the land of song to find its voice once more.
