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Monday, June 23, 2014

All quiet on the Welsh front: reliving the horrors of Mametz

It was a five-day fight for a square mile of Somme trees that left thousands dead. Now National Theatre Wales are recreating the Battle of Mametz Wood on a sheep farm

It was the sound of the gunfire that caught you, they said: something between a muffled rumble and a roar, felt in the stomach long before you got anywhere near battle. After a while, you got used to it. Only when it stopped did you start to worry.

The last place you'd expect to hear the guns of the western front would be on a sheep farm in Monmouthshire. But that's reckoning without National Theatre Wales. Having summoned to life such unlikely events as a re-enactment of Christ's Passion in industrial Port Talbot and ancient Greek tragedy in the Brecon Beacons, this summer NTW is attempting an even more audacious challenge: making site-specific theatre from the first world war.

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READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com