A Resurrection that really hit home

Allison Pearson on Michael Sheen's extraordinary performance in the Port Talbot Passion; her Olympic ticket nightmare - and last minute excitement before the Royal Wedding. 

 

On Sunday night, we went to the Crucifixion. We had been walking for hours in the procession. The evening still held the heat of the day and the children were tired and thirsty, but when I suggested that we turn back, they both wanted to stay. “We can’t leave Jesus now,” my daughter reasoned. “His cross is so heavy. If he can do it, so can we.”

Christ, he looked terrible. The blood on his cheeks, the anguish in his face, his body cowering like a whipped dog. We had seen his trial earlier in the afternoon and when he kept silent and refused to explain why he should be spared and Barry (Barabas) the thief condemned, the guards with their automatic weapons dragged him into the shopping precinct. On closed-circuit television, relayed to screens in the civic square, we saw him kicked and punched, and grown men and women wept.

There were thousands of us, by then. The kids and I were caught up in the human tide that swept forward into the precinct. In the centre, on a dais, his mother, a broad fiftysomething woman with dyed blonde hair wearing a blue anorak, knelt and washed the man they called the Teacher, tenderly sponging the wounds on his face. Around her were local women of every shape and size with buckets, wringing out cloths containing all the tears of all the mothers in the world who have lost their sons.

Am I making it sound sad? It wasn’t only sad. The Passion, staged by the people of Port Talbot for 72 hours over the Easter weekend and starring local boy-done-good Michael Sheen, was devastating, which it should be, and compelling, festive, strange, angry, joyful and sometimes incoherent and crazy – as you would expect from any drama with 1,000 performers, seven choirs, the Manic Street Preachers and a brass band attached to a rolling road-closure programme with its own police escort.

The setting was perfect. As comedian Robin Williams once observed, if Jesus Christ comes back, he’s not going to be skipping in some flower meadow, he’ll be a tattooed fitter in a steelworks. When I was a child in south Wales, Port Talbot was the place with the bad smell. We used to drive through the town with its belching chimneys and hastily wind up the car windows. This was what Sheen and the writer and poet Owen Sheers were trying to address in this National Theatre of Wales production. “Port Talbot has always been the butt of the joke,” explained Sheen. “It is bypassed and overlooked by the M4. In this town, you wake up every day and you have the message reinforced that there’s nothing worth stopping for.”

 Source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/