At the Arts Council of Wales, we are deeply saddened to hear of the death of Mike Pearson.
Mike was a towering figure in European theatre with a major international reputation as theatre practitioner and thinker. The challenging, provocative and explosively disorientating work he made with key partners in Brith Gof, Cardiff Lab and National Theatre Wales will resonate in our imaginations for many decades to come.
Mike changed theatre in Wales forever. Artists who worked with him like Marc Rees and Eddie Ladd have sustained the thrilling site-specific and cross-artform work that he pioneered. And he had a shaping influence on so much that has been memorable in the shows of our national theatre companies in Welsh and in English and in the work of Volcano.
Each of us who came alive to experimental and site-specific work through seminal shows like Gododdin will have our own memories, our own dreamscapes that live in us from the layering of time and place in Mike’s work.
My own strongest connection was from my time as Chair of National Theatre Wales. John McGrath had this strong sense of the European stature and ongoing importance of Mike’s work. For some years, Mike had concentrated on his distinguished academic work but John brought the two Mikes, the Pearson/Brookes partnership, into a glorious relationship with the new national company.
I will never forget a broken king stumbling through the cotton grass under an August moon on Mynydd Epynt’s Army training range in their production of Kaite O’Reilly’s version of The Persians. I will always remember the crowd-confronting, tailgate speeches of Richard Lynch’s Coriolanus and his conflict with Richard Harrington’s Aufidius, played out among the breeze block walls and vehicles of an RAF hangar in St Athan.
And so much more, so much more that others of you will want to remember and record. And all of it coming from this gentle, reflective, quizzical man. Depth and social conviction producing magic.
The air will continue to vibrate with Mike Pearson’s creative imagination.