Can one star save Welsh theatre? On a spring morning in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), 180 people are thronging for the answers. We’re in the Awen bar next to the gorgeous 1,900-capacity Donald Gordon theatre, which last summer staged the hit play Nye, about NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. This experience inspired its lead actor, Michael Sheen, to set up the new Welsh National Theatre (WNT), as he tells us today, scruffy-bearded and check-shirted, bouncing around a much smaller, makeshift stage. “Listen,” he says, responding to an apology for this stage’s minuteness, “I’ve acted in Aberavon shopping centre, so I’m used to being on anything.”

Sheen’s latest venture arrives after a hell of a few months, as we Welsh people say, for English-language theatre in Wales. In December, the Cardiff-based National Theatre Wales (NTW – a separate organisation, founded in 2009) closed down, stripped of all Arts Council funding. In January came a cross-party Welsh Senedd report, A Decade of Cuts, revealing Wales ranked second to bottom for cultural spending in Europe (at £69 per person, above only Greece; by comparison, the UK received £91, neighbouring Ireland £...
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