Michael Sheen Archives - North West End UK

5Mar

By Dave SmithNo Comments

London

Our Town – Rose Theatre

Michael Sheen is the Artistic Director of Welsh National Theatre, and this is their inaugural production, co-produced by Rose Theatre themselves. Sheen has put his money where his mouth is, funding WNT himself. They begin with an American classic, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. While this may not sound innately Welsh - the tale of a quintessential American town - it is said that Dylan Thomas was familiar with both Wilder and his play when he wrote Under Milk Wood. So, we take ourselves to Grover’s Corners, a small town with a Welsh accent somewhere, well let’s just say somewhere. The Stage Manager guides the audience through the story, introduces us to a number of the inhabitants and we jump back and forward in time to follow their trials and tribulations. Sheen himself plays the Sta...

Staged (Series 2) – BBC iPlayer

The first series of Staged was one of the surprise successes of 2020, using the boundaries imposed by the pandemic and the shortage of new TV those limitations had imposed to create a low-budget and instantaneous reaction to the situation in six fifteen minute chunks. The overall narrative followed the attempts by fictional versions of Michael Sheen, David Tennant and Simon Evans (played by themselves) to rehearse remotely Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author during lockdown. The attempt is ultimately unsuccessful and the episodes themselves revolve around the different distractions and problems the trio face during this process. As we find ourselves in another lockdown (is this one the second? Or third? What are the criteria?), a second series did make a certain ...

Staged – BBC iPlayer

As lockdown measures begin to ease and businesses reopen their doors, there has been a lot of focus on the effect of quarantine on theatres and whether or not the industry will survive. The crisis has created a lot of negativity for theatres, as it has for many things in our society, but Staged, written and directed by Simon Evans, may be one of the few good things that has come out of this. The series focuses on exaggerated versions of David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who are rehearsing for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, also directed by Evans, over Zoom. The beginning very much has the feel of The Trip as Tennant and Sheen show off their abilities to do accents, but quickly comes into its own originality. As well as the Zoom calls between the various charact...