A year ago, actor Michael Sheen pledged to launch a new national theatre for Wales using his own money. He's now preparing to star in its first full production and says he wants the company to be a major force in Wales, the rest of the UK and beyond.
When a "window of opportunity" opened to start a new national theatre in Wales, Michael Sheen was, by his own admission, the only person who could make it happen.
"I don't mean because of any innate brilliance that I have," he explains hastily, "but just because of the position I was in.
"I could kick-start it myself financially, I could pay for things to begin with, I had a profile, I could get media interest, I could open doors in terms of getting people involved."
Indeed, as one of Wales's (and the UK's) most admired actors, he has the requisite profile and powers of persuasion, and has pockets that are deeper than most.
He has previously put his hands in those pockets to fund projects like the Homeless World Cup , and to write off hundreds of people's debts , and has been vocal about cuts to Welsh culture .
So when the old National Theatre of Wales closed at the end of 2024 following funding cuts from the Arts Council of Wales, Sheen came up with a plan for a replacement. His vision was for a company that would "do bigger things that are more expensive, and have more ambition, and are bolder" than its predecessor.
"Ultimately, I found myself arguing for something that I realised I was in the best position to deliver. Because ultimately, what I was arguing for was quite perverse in that it was flying completely in the face of the prevailing winds," he admits.
"And people would quite rightly go, 'Well, how can we... that can't happen, that just can't happen'.
"And I realised that it could happen, but only if I did it."
So, at the start of 2025, Sheen announced the birth of the Welsh National Theatre , with himself as founding artistic director.
One year on, the company's first major production opens this week and reflects Sheen's big ambitions, with a cast of 19 and a creative team including Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies.
One thing it isn't, however, is Welsh. The inaugural play is Thornton Wilder's 1938 American classic Our Town, set in the fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.
But Our Town is thought to have inspired Dylan Thomas's Welsh masterpiece Under Milk Wood and, recognising its depiction of small-town community life, Sheen and director Francesca Goodridge decided to move Grover's Corners to Wales.
"Me and Fran both felt instinctively that it could work really well with Welsh actors in a Welsh setting," Sheen explains.
Goodridge adds: "Because it's a fictional town, Grover's Corners can be any town.
"Thornton Wilder has written characters that we all know, like the person delivering the milk, the two mums talking over the garden wall. You've got things that instantly [make] you go, 'I know this place'. It's a universal story."
It's an apparently gentle tale of small-town life, but Sheen says the emotional impact of it is "like being woken up".
"It taps you into something essential about what it is to be alive, and how precious that is."
Originally written just before World War Two and partly set just before World War One, it has a sense that "something is coming", Sheen adds.
"For a play about what seem like small events going on in a small town, there's this sense of a shadow growing over it, and in that shadow a warning that life can disappear like that, that this can all be gone in a second, and you have to make the most of it."
Our Town opens in Swansea, the new company's home city, before touring to north Wales and ending in south-west London at the Rose theatre, the show's co-producer.
Later this year, Sheen will star in and co-direct the company's next production, Owain & Henry - playing Owain Glyndwr, the last Welsh-born Prince of Wales, who led a revolt against Henry IV from 1400.
"It's a real foundational story for Welsh culture and sense of Welsh i
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