Made in Port Talbot

Port Talbot, on the coast of South Wales, is literally overlooked. Most experience the town while flying over it on the M4, held aloft by concrete stilts planted in terraced streets. From that four-lane gantry, the only landmarks are the dockyard cranes and belching steelworks.

Over Easter in 2011, National Theatre Wales staged a piece of street theatre that was crafted as a civic resurrection. The Passion of Port Talbot featured Michael Sheen as a Messiah-like teacher who harkens to oral memories. ‘I remember!’ he hollered on the third day, while attached to a crucifix on a traffic island by Aberavon beach, before reeling off a litany of local names: of villages, streets, sweet shops, pubs, clubs, mountains.

The sense of Port Talbot as an evanescence is in the blood of the place. I once asked Anthony Hopkins if he ever goes back. ‘On Google Earth I’m always going back to Bracken Road,’ he said.