Port Talbot Passion
Recently, the Welsh industrial town of Port Talbot was the setting for a play that has been described as the greatest theatrical event in 21st-century Britain. Quite apart from its artistic merits, the work offers a powerful reaffirmation of the residual power of Christian imagery in one of the world’s most secular societies.
The play has been made into a film, The Gospel of Us. Its director and designer is Dave McKean, a near-legendary figure in the world of comics (The Sandman) and pop culture, which raises the odds that the film will be released in the United States.
I confess to a vested interest here: Port Talbot is my hometown. The community has suffered enormously in recent decades. Port Talbot was a classic boom town in the 1960s, at its peak employing some 20,000 in its gargantuan steelworks. By the 1980s, that industry had collapsed, leaving behind a grim rustbelt world, a depressed and depressing place. Large sections of the town were devastated by a brutally insensitive freeway development that tore communities apart. In every sense, the town has been bypassed.
