Our Town – Rose Theatre, London

Writer:  Thornton Wilder

Director: Francesca Goodridge

 Our Town is a great choice for the inaugural production of Michael Sheen’s Welsh National Theatre, co-produced with the Rose Theatre. Thorton Wilder’s classic play celebrates the joys of a small town community in a way which resonates with Sheen’s passionate espousal of the local in his native Wales.

Grover’s Corner, Wilder’s fictional American town, is successfully relocated to Wales. Some of the place names change – there’s a lovely litany of Welsh mountains and valleys the Stage Manager sees from the hilltop cemetery, for instance – but others remain stoutly American. In fact, such apparent anomalies work well in a play which Wilder constantly reminds us is a fiction. From its opening, when the Stage Manager strides onto an empty stage, clicking his fingers for the lights to come up, we know we’re in a metatheatrical space and happy to accept its conventions.

Designer Hayley Grindle stays true to Wilder’s insistence on minimal set and props. Planks of wood are used creatively to do service as everything from kitchen tables to churches. Small stands of reeds are wheeled about to suggest crops and gardens. Ladders add a particular poignancy to the cemetery in the final act, where the dead are all perched on high like memorial statues. Costumes are deliberately plain, but their muted earth colours glow in certain lights. Lighting itself, by designer Ryan Joseph Stafford, is charmingly imaginative.

It’s a glorious production, given pace by director Francesca Goodridge, and full of joyful movement (Jess Williams) and song. Dyfan Jones has created a delightful score and directs the actors in moving community singing: there’s nothing like a burst of Guide me, O Thou Great Redeemer to conjure up Wales. And it’s joy that Wilder is celebrating – the joy of small pleasures of ordinary life in an unremarkable place. But it’s a joy made all the more intense by a constant awareness of death. In the opening scene, the Stage Manager introduces characters who have already died, and famously, the third act takes us forward some 12 years, where several people we’ve come to know have now joined them in the cemetery. Framing this is an awareness of the American Civil War and the imminence of World War I.

Sheen is compelling as the Stage Manager with his clear relish for every word he speaks. He has fun occasionally transforming into minor characters – he’s particularly amusing as Mrs Forrest, for example. The large cast is excellent, notable performers being Peter Devlin as the young man George Gibbs and Yasemin Özdemir as his childhood friend, later to become his bride. Their parents are played by Rebecca Killick, Rhodri Meilir, Sian Reese-Williams and Nia Roberts with individuality and wit.

Audience members unfamiliar with the play might be reminded of It’s a Wonderful Life with its warm celebration of ordinary life. But Wilder avoids the latter’s sentimentality by giving Our Town a certain pleasing astringency. Not only are we always reminded of the brevity of life and the certainty of death, but the character of the alcoholic organist, Simon Stimson (a moving Rhys Warrington), also gestures to something else.

For all that the play centres on young love and features a delightful wedding scene, we are made aware that the constant injunctions to pair off, to go in ‘two by two’, will consciously exclude some members of society. Stimson may be a nod to Wilder’s own single status, and the playwright gives a pleasing sourness to the reflections of the Stage Manager-cum-vicar: ‘I’ve married over two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don’t know.’

A powerful production.

Runs until 28 March 2026