REVIEW by Andy Weltch: ‘Port Talbot Gotta Banksy’ at Sherman Theatre, Cardiff

This entertaining and thought-provoking new play tells the true story of what happened when Banksy unexpectedly painted an artwork on the side of a garage in Port Talbot.

Its script is taken verbatim from interviews with people of the town – and it’s all the more engaging because of it.

I was lucky to be invited to this week’s (Tuesday 7 May) press night in Cardiff before the play tours Wales.

While Paul Jenkins (who also directs) and Tracy Harris are credited as the writers, their role was more editing than writing – ingeniously finding the most appropriate quotes from 150 hours of interviews and weaving them together to create a gripping and dramatically cohesive play of two hours (including the interval).

It starts in December 2018, when the South Wales town woke to find the mysterious Bristol-based street artist Banksy had delivered an unexpected Christmas present – an art piece depicting a boy, standing wide-armed and open-mouthed, apparently in a snow fall. But the snow is really soot from the town’s polluting steel furnaces.

The piece becomes an immediate attraction, but soon reality bites – who will protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters? What will become of it in the longer term? How can the town benefit from this unique gift? And how to react to its damning message about pollution, when the steelworks is the town’s major employer?

Someone needs to provide the answers, but who can the people turn to? The Welsh Government? Neath Port Talbot Council? Michael Sheen?!

After the interval, we fast forward to 2024, when Port Talbot is in the news again with the end of blast furnace steel-making, bringing job losses and new fears for the future.

And we conclude with the Banksy leaving the town, but new signs of hope filling the gap.

The play’s creators Paul Jenkins and Tracy Harris of Theatr3 started interviewing people in the town during the weeks after the Banksy appeared. It was never intended to become a play, but I’m so glad it did, because this is a captivating and enjoyable piece of theatre.

All the parts (I lost count of them) are played by a talented and versatile cast – Matthew Bulgo, Holly Carpenter, Ioan Hefin, Simon Nehan, Jalisa Phoenix-Roberts, and Kerry Joy Stewart – who deliver their lines with total authenticity and precision timing.

At times it’s poignant and at others it’s laugh-out-loud funny – and that’s true of real life, I suppose.

It’s unusual and exciting to experience a piece of theatre as real as this – brilliantly capturing the mix of emotions Port Talbot has experienced over the past six or seven years, in the words of the people who have lived through it all.

And although it’s all about one town at one point in time, its concerns are relatable to events across society. It reminds us that problems are often complicated and there are rarely easy solutions. What seems like a blessing to some, may be a curse to others – whether that’s the dilemma over an artwork or whether jobs should be prioritsed over the environment.

Port Talbot Gotta Banksy continues at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff until Saturday (10 May). For tickets, call the box office on 029 2064 6900 or visit the theatre’s website. It then visits The Plaza, Port Talbot; Grand Theatre, Swansea: Torch Theatre, Milford Haven; and Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham.

Review by Andy Weltch

Photos by Kirsten McTernan

We received free tickets for this performance in exchange for an honest review