Stage-to-screen review: Our Town

The comparative theatrical quiet of August often means a chance for me to catch up on some digital versions of shows I'd missed, and NTatHome have just added Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in its recent touring co-production from The Actor Michael Sheen's Welsh National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston*. Sheen plays the Stage Manager, a figure who it occured to me this time I would be interested to see played quite sinister - Sheen doesn't go there, giving the affable character we usually see, but he does stress the way the play's narrator knows all the dark secrets of how the other characters' lives and deaths will pan out. I also felt we really got the idea of why, within the play's universe at least, it makes sense to give him that title: Especially in the final act he's seen engineering the story and the way it'll be told.

Of course the more obvious reason Wilder called his narrator the Stage Manager is the metatheatrical nature of the storytelling, a stripped-down look at a few average and not-so-average days in the life of early 20th century New Hampshire town Grover's Corners.

Although we get a sweeping view of the whole town's notable figures, the first act starts to focus on next door neighbours Dr and Mrs Gibbs (Matthew Trevannion and Sian Reese-Williams) and Mr and Mrs Webb (Rhodri Meilir and Nia Roberts.) The second act zooms in even further on their children, Emily Webb (Yasemine Özdemir) and George Gibbs (Peter Devlin) as they prepare for their wedding day, and we flash back to the moment when the teenage friends first realised they wanted to be something more.

Emily is also the focal point of the final act as we jump forward a few - but not many - years to a much more sombre occasion, and it's this section whose extraordinary conceit of how to look at life and death has raised the play into an enduring classic still being produced nearly a century on, rather than the somewhat twee slice of Americana it looks like at first.

Not that Americana is particularly the first thing you think of in Francesca Goodridge's production, which unsurprisingly keeps all the cast's native Welsh accents, as well as having the hymns that occasionally punctuate the story being sung in the Welsh language. All the references in the text remain American, and I did wonder if the show could have gone the extra step and changed some of the script, but ultimately the disconnect between the words being said and the accent they're being said in adds to the play's general universality. The accent does lead to a weirdly laboured way of saying the town's name, but having been in this play at school I can sympathise, "Grover's Corners" is very much The Rural Juror of unpronounceable place names.

For the most part Goodridge's production is traditional, although she does make it overt that choirmaster Simon Stimson's (Rhys Warrington) alcoholism and depression stem from his being closeted. Hayley Grindle's designs lean heavily on planks of wood that the actors turn into all the props and furniture, and I really liked the conceit of having the final act take place up stepladders to represent the cemetary on a hill overlooking the town. This can be a tricky play because the first 90 minutes can feel like it's wringing everything it can out of wholesome American values before the ending pulls the rug out from under you, but Özdemir is the real standout here, whose journey through the highs and lows of life keeps you invested.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder is available to stream on NTatHome.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*no, she went of her own accord