A child catching ash, a town catching its breath
A child stands in winter, mouth open to the sky. Snow falls, or so it seems—until you step around the corner and see the burning bin, the flakes turning to ash. That double image, painted on a Port Talbot garage wall in December 2018 and quickly confirmed as a work by Banksy, hit like a flare. It also lit a fuse that’s still burning. Today, with the town’s blast furnaces switched off and lives reshaped, a new play turns that moment into a full-length portrait of a community trying to make sense of itself.
Port Talbot Gotta Banksy, which premiered at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff before touring Wales in May 2025, is built from the town’s own words. Not impressions. Not tidy summaries. Verbatim. The creative team—writer-directors Paul Jenkins and Tracy Harris of Theatr3—recorded more than 150 hours of interviews over six years. Those conversations started as a quick response to Wales’ first confirmed Banksy. They grew into an archive of pride, doubt, loss, defiance, and humor as the town’s story changed around the painting.
The mural itself, officially titled Season’s Greetings but known everywhere as “Port Talbot’s Banksy,” was first spotted by steelworker Ian Lewis. It sat on his garage in Taibach, instantly turning a side street into a destination. Was it about pollution? About childhood wonder curdling into hard reality? About Port Talbot’s love-hate bond with the steelworks? Residents argued, laughed, worried about traffic and tourists, and argued some more. The debate felt familiar because it was never just about art. It was about who gets to define a place—and who pays the price when the weather changes.
Jenkins and Harris started recording when the paint was still fresh. Their plan was modest: capture the immediate reaction to a once-in-a-generation cultural moment. Then real life raised the stakes. In 2024, blast furnace steel-making—an industrial heartbeat that had defined Port Talbot for generations—came to an end. Jobs, identity, status, and the town’s future all moved from background noise to front-page urgency. The mural didn’t change, but its meaning did. What began as a local curiosity hardened into a lens through which people started asking bigger questions.
The production answers those questions by handing the microphone back to residents. On stage, professional actors wear earphones that feed them real recordings in real time. They mouth those words with the same rhythms, hesitations, and punchlines they heard. The technique sounds simple; the effect isn’t. It dissolves the distance between audience and subject. You’re not watching characters interpret a community. You’re listening to the community—accent, phrasing, and all—speak for itself.
Jenkins calls it a story about “people, power and street art.” Those three words rub against each other for two acts. Act One looks straight at the mural: the scramble to protect it, the pride of having a world-famous artwork on a garage wall, the fear of damage, the arguments about what it “really” means. Act Two zooms out. The scenes move to streets and kitchens. You hear about habits that became normal—soot swept from windowsills, washing lines turning orange. You hear about health scares that never felt abstract: one resident’s memory of a 33-year-old dying from asthma and COPD. You hear how people kept their jobs and their dignity, and how those two things are not always the same.
That balance—of work versus air, home versus horizon—hangs over the entire production. Some voices want the furnaces burning, because work isn’t theory. Others want the air clean, because lungs aren’t theory either. Most live in the middle, which is harder to dramatize but where the truth usually sits. The play doesn’t choose for them. It lets the tension stand. That choice gives the show its charge.
There’s also the market value of art, always awkward in a place still reckoning with industrial decline. Essex-based dealer John Brandler bought Season’s Greetings for a six-figure sum and, by all accounts, supported this theatrical project, calling it “historic.” He once tried to set up an urban art museum in the area. Those plans were reportedly rejected by the local council. You can hear the friction in that single storyline: Who owns a street when something priceless appears on it overnight?
The staging is spare but clever. Because the actors take dialogue straight from the recordings through earphones, the pace has a live-wire unpredictability. They can’t tidy the language. They can’t reset a line. They catch the laughter in a half-second delay and the grief in a swallowed syllable. Critics noticed the result: audiences swing from a joke to a jolt in the space of a breath. That mood whiplash feels right for Port Talbot, where a good day and a bad day can share the same view of the works.
The tour mapped a Wales-wide conversation. Dates included the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff (May 2–10, 2025), Plaza Port Talbot (May 15–17), Torch Theatre in Milford Haven (May 20), Grand Theatre Swansea (May 22), and Tŷ Pawb in Wrexham (May 24). The production had support from the National Theatre Studio and funding from the Arts Council of Wales. That backing matters. It signals that institutions are willing to fund work that doesn’t just celebrate a town’s past but listens to its present, with all the messy edges left in.
What keeps the show from feeling like a lecture is its curiosity. It doesn’t only ask “What did Banksy mean?” It asks, “What did we mean?” What did the town project onto those falling flakes? What did the country expect Port Talbot to be—gritty proof of resilience, or a warning label for the costs of heavy industry? The mural became a screen for all of that. People saw themselves in it. They saw their kids. They saw their parents. They saw a headline they’d rather not read again.
There’s another thread: power. Street art arrives without permission. Heavy industry leaves with decisions made far from the streets where people live. The show puts those facts next to each other. How do you protect a work that was never meant to be protected? How do you plan a future for a town that never planned to lose its past so quickly? The play doesn’t force tidy answers. It lets you sit with the knot.
Because the script comes from everyday speech, it captures what polished statements miss. People make jokes to keep the air light. They talk about washing the car again. They worry that a child’s cough sounds different this time. They say they’re fine. They say they’re not. They repeat a story, not because they forgot they told it but because saying it again makes it more real. Verbatim theatre is built for those loops and pauses. It treats them as the data of ordinary life.
The memory of discovery still sparkles. Ian Lewis finding that mural on his garage wasn’t just a twist of fate; it was a moment that made his front wall a national talking point. Overnight, neighbors became guides. Visitors arrived. The mural belonged to the world and also, stubbornly, to that street. The play respects that odd geography. You feel how a global name met a local place and both changed a little in the mix.
It also captures the ache of living through a news cycle that won’t sit still. In 2018, the story was a surprise masterpiece and the thrill of a secret revealed. By 2024, the story was the end of blast furnace steel-making and everything that follows from that. Those years taught residents to read more into that child with the open mouth—naive joy, or courage, or denial, or maybe just a hunger for something better than the air they’ve got.
Across the run, the production earned praise for its emotional range. Reviewers pointed to the way a laugh lands right before a gut punch—how a throwaway line about dust on the sill can turn into a memory of a hospital visit in a blink. That nimble shift isn’t stage trickery. It’s fidelity to the interviews. Real life rarely arranges itself into neat acts and consequences. It moves sideways. The play follows.
Money and legacy hover in the background. Brandler’s purchase put a price tag on a found object. It also forced a community to ask what kind of care an unplanned artwork deserves. Do you shield it? Sell it? Share it? The show keeps the conversation open. It nods to the failed museum idea and to the reality that big cultural moves require more than goodwill. They need trust, coordination, and a plan that outlives a news flash.
If there’s a center to all of this, it’s the voices. You hear a town weighing its values in real time. The interviews carry the muscle memory of shift patterns and the blunt math of bills due. They also carry pride in craft, and the stubborn belief that a place is more than the sum of its hardships. That’s the resilience the production spotlights—not a slogan, but a habit of carrying on while telling the truth about why it’s hard.
Port Talbot Gotta Banksy is not a nostalgia tour and not a campaign ad. It’s a record—living, imperfect, and honest—of what people said when their town became a symbol. It shows the cost of symbols and the care they require. And it suggests that art, when it arrives uninvited, can still be welcomed as a tool for asking better questions.
After the furnaces: what the play leaves behind
Now that the tour has wrapped, its influence is starting to settle. Schools and community groups have fresh material to talk about what makes a town home. Theatre-makers have a case study in how to let people speak for themselves without losing pace or craft. Local leaders have a mirror they can hold up before announcing the next plan. None of that fixes what’s tough. It does make it harder to ignore.
There’s a reason audiences lean forward when the actors flick a glance to the wings, listening for the next line to arrive through their earpiece. It’s a small reminder that every word on stage belongs to someone outside the theatre. The stakes are personal. When the show records a joke about tourists taking selfies by a garage door, it’s recording a form of control—people grabbing a moment back by laughing at it. When it sits with grief, it’s acknowledging that some costs don’t show up on charts.
The final image people carry out of the auditorium varies. Some see the child in the mural as a warning about the lies we tell ourselves. Some see him as proof that wonder can survive the worst kind of weather. Both readings sit comfortably in Port Talbot, where the sky has always told more than one story at once. The play trusts the audience to keep wrestling with that picture on their own time.
Port Talbot didn’t ask to be a canvas. It didn’t ask to be a test case for how a town shifts from heavy industry to whatever comes next. But it has the voices to tell the story. For a few weeks in May 2025, those voices filled theatres from Cardiff to Wrexham. The words won’t fade as fast as paint. That might be the real legacy: a community heard, in its own accent, deciding how it wants to be seen.
