Port Talbot Gotta Banksy review – street art Santa’s awkward gift to small town

Christmas seemed to travel aboriginal to Port Talbot successful 2018 erstwhile residents woke up to find that Banksy, similar immoderate thoroughfare creation Santa, had talented the municipality with his latest work. Graffitied successful the shadows of the steelworks, “Season’s Greetings” appeared to festively picture a kid with their lingua outstretched, catching snowflakes. Seen from a antithetic position it was revealed to beryllium falling ash.

Written by Tracy Harris and Paul Jenkins (who besides directs) and edited from much than 150 hours of interviews with those whose lives were affected by Banksy’s intervention, Port Talbot Gotta Banksy is simply a verbatim relationship of what happened next: the invited and unwelcome attention, governmental inertia compounded by austerity, and however working-class communities are ever taxable to the whims of planetary marketplace forces, beryllium those of alloy oregon the creation world.

Designed by Cai Dyfan and with a strikingly effectual lighting plan by Cara Hood, it is sensitively staged and performed by a superb ensemble of six, with Jalisa Phoenix-Roberts peculiarly affecting. As the substance is delivered portion the performers perceive to the archetypal interviews done earpieces – enactment connected astatine the performance’s beginning, touchingly removed towards the extremity – the technique’s precision speaks to the attraction with which the accumulation regards its interviewees. Throughout, this feels similar an important theatrical corrective, giving dependable to those who are truthful often sidelined.

But what the verbatim substance gains successful authenticity besides exposes the constraints of the form. Narrative momentum is mostly driven by prerecorded journalistic reports, and episodic scenes of descriptive nonstop code often hint astatine perchance richer melodramatic currents; the subtext successful a large pause, the woman and parent with a vodka vessel successful her dressing gown who has buried a hubby and son, the hardly suppressed urgency with which an unemployed steelworker offers his telephone number.

One feels that determination are different compelling stories present that merit to beryllium told, without needing to beryllium refracted done a azygous artwork. But successful its astir stirring moments, this is simply a heartfelt solemnisation of a community’s resilience and agency, attested to successful a triumphant closing montage of the thoroughfare creation that has sprouted successful Port Talbot successful the intervening years.