One highlight of the next two years will be a work called The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning
A dramatisation based on the teenage school years of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning in Haverfordwest is to be a highlight of the second year of the National Theatre of Wales.
The NTW will today announce details online of its forthcoming programme after something of a stellar first year, which memorably included taking over most of Port Talbot for Michael Sheen's The Passion and staging The Persians on the army ranges of the Brecon Beacons.
Artistic director John McGrath said they had achieved the ambitions they set for themselves. "To do one production a month every month was quite a journey to go on but it was a fantastic journey – and we did it," he said.
The NTW has become known for its ambitious site-specific work. "We've proved that there are real joys to not having a building as you do reach a whole new group of people when you take theatre into unusual places," said McGrath.
That work will continue, he said, and one highlight of year two will be a work called The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning by the TV writer Tim Price. Manning, still held in a US military prison before his court martial, spent some of his school days in west Wales when he moved there aged 13 with his Welsh mother.
"I'd asked Tim to think about what was missing in our first year and he came back and said a contemporary political play, which is why I asked him to go ahead and write something," said McGrath.
"It won't be a play about Bradley Manning as such, it's not a verbatim piece. It will be using the case as a prism to explore how do people feel about their political voice today?"
The hope is that the play will be opened in a school in Haverfordwest, although it's not a school play as such.
The team that created The Persians in a mock German village will return for a project produced as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The plan is to reinterpret Coriolanus in an era of 24-hour news and obsession with celebrity culture. It will be staged in the Dragon Film Studios near Bridgend next August.
Peter Gill, one of Wales's greatest living theatre writers and directors, has adapted Chekhov's story A Provincial Life for the stage and it will be one of the few productions actually staged in a theatre – at the Sherman Cymru, Cardiff.
In May next year, the NTW will join forces with the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly to stage Little Dogs, inspired by the Dylan Thomas story Just Like Little Dogs, in the Patti Pavilion overlooking Swansea Bay.
The NTW, which sold 87% of its tickets in year one, will also stage a production outside Wales for the first time, taking its production of The Dark Philosophers to the Edinburgh Festival this August.
Dai Smith, chairman of the Arts Council of Wales said: "National Theatre Wales's inaugural programme has challenged familiar notions of what theatre is, and what it could be. With imagination, intelligence and wit, it has created exciting new partnerships that have been the catalyst to an explosion of creativity in communities across Wales. We look forward to supporting the company's next phase of development."
Manning, 23, is facing a long prison sentence after being charged with leaking highly embarrassing secret government documents about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and diplomatic cables from every US embassy in the world.
His detention for 23 hours a day in a tiny unfurnished cell at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, caused a storm of protest; he was moved to another prison last month.