If there is anyone who can save Wales’s ailing theatre industry, it is Michael Sheen. Last year, the Good Omens star founded the Welsh National Theatre following the demise of the National Theatre of Wales, after the latter lost its funding. (Sheen’s is a new organisation, but the pitch is similar to its predecessor’s, hence the confusingly similar name.) In only a year, Sheen has done wonders for raising the profile of his company, with a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town which was both critically and commercially well received.
But instead of celebrating, the Welsh arts world is complaining. According to The Stage, 50 Welsh creatives think Sheen’s celebrity has led to preferential treatment when it comes to his company getting cash, and have signed a formal letter to the Arts Council of Wales saying so.
The letter argues that Sheen’s company was not eligible for two separate injections of £200,000. While I am no expert in the ins and outs of arts grants I’m quite sure that Sheen’s clout has increased confidence in Welsh theatre more broadly and should ultimately boost an industry that is brimming with talent. Theatr Cymru in Mold is one of the UK’s best regional theatres, while the Sherman Theatre (based in Cardiff) was responsible for Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott, probably the best new monologue I have seen in the past 20 years.
The fact is that celebrity sells, and your average punter is going to be more drawn to Sheen playing Owain Glyndŵr (the play Owain and Henry, which focuses on the Welsh hero’s conflict with Henry IV opens this autumn), than an actor they have never heard of. A cynic would say that an enterprise such as Sheen’s is fuelled by ego, but our chief theatre critic Dominic Cavendish’s review of Our Town stressed that it felt very much like a collaborative effort.
In the toxic world of theatre, star names have a huge mountain to climb. In Scotland, poor Alan Cumming nobly waived his salary when he took on the role of artistic director of the Pitlochry Festival. Cumming did this in order to fix real issues such as mending the stage in the outdoor amphitheatre, but still some industry insiders carped, saying it set a dangerous precedent and risked distorting pay for the sector. I mean, please. If I didn’t know better I would say this is nitpicking, fuelled by a sense of resentment. Wasn’t a rich man just being generous? Also, Cumming has done a great job in the role, creating an artistic programme featuring big-hitters (the sublime Siobhan Redmond in Beckett’s Happy Days, a new musical A History of Paper, featuring Cumming himself and Shirley Henderson) that has put Pitlochry on the map in a way that those involved could have only previously have dreamed of.
After Alan Cumming waived his salary as artistic director of the Pitlochry Festival, industry insiders claimed it risked distorting pay for the sector – Rii Schroer for The Telegraph
I realise that the theatre world is unequal, and that salaries can be perilously low (the average salary of a theatre director in the UK is a little over £35,000), but the fact is that people like Cumming and Sheen are its biggest hope. The Arts Councils of England and Wales, plus Creative Scotland, are hardly knights in shining armour these days, with far too many arts organisations (including many theatre companies) fighting for far too little money. With our economy stagnant, this situation is not going to improve any time soon, and we need glamour and celebrity to boost sales, particularly in the subsidised sector.
I can only imagine that everyone at the Royal Shakespeare Company is breathing a sigh of relief as its artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey continue to book famous names. A friend told me they couldn’t get a ticket for Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Mark Gatiss for love nor money, while Kenneth Branagh’s long-awaited return to the company that made him in The Tempest is entirely sold out, too. For a company that is facing a multimillion pound shortfall, such signings are eminently sensible.
Kenneth Branagh’s long-awaited return to the RSC in The Tempest is entirely sold out – Johan Persson
But shouldn’t companies such as the RSC make stars, not hire them, I hear you say. Well, I am afraid, in this fragmented media age where theatre has to fight harder for a space in the conversation than ever before, such considerations are fanciful. And in any case, theatre has always had to fight to be heard. It is unlikely that our own National Theatre would have got off the ground without Laurence Olivier at the helm (mind you, the fact that it was beset by teething problems was often down to Olivier, too).
So this is why everyone in Wales should celebrate Sheen; he is not some parachuted in A-lister but the real deal, who might, in the long run, be doing the naysayers a favour.
