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As an actor Michael Sheen has a remarkable gift for perhaps the biggest thespian challenge of all – portraying real-life characters.

He has been pitch-perfect in many voices, from Kenneth Williams to David Frost, from Brian Clough to Tony Blair.

As an activist it is his own voice that now inspires, as he speaks with power, passion and insight on the need for progressive change in Wales and beyond. And last week Sheen added that voice to an illustrious roll-call of academic heavyweights who have given the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture.

It proved the perfect fit. Raymond Williams was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century – a Welshman whose writings on politics, culture and the mass media made an impact across the world.

If Williams brought a political perspective to the arts, Sheen has returned the favour, using his influence working in the Hollywood nerve centre of global popular culture to make some of the most articulate interventions in the political debates of recent times.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

So it was always going to be a great gig. Yet the 120 of us who were fortunate enough to be in Merthyr Tydfil last Thursday to hear Sheen speak – and the thousands more who watched online – had our breath taken away by just how good he was.

As I was introducing the evening, I’d had a sneak preview of the words: 33 pages of forensically researched, coruscating and vividly illustrated argument on a theme central to Raymond Williams himself – Who Speaks For Wales?

The polemic was impressive enough on the written page but as Sheen brought his words to life with the delivery only an actor of his calibre can provide, the effect was mesmerising.

He spoke for an hour and 45 minutes without pause and it zipped by. The setting was the Redhouse – Merthyr’s former town hall now reinvented as an arts and community venue, with contemporary styling complementing its Victorian grandeur. And in a place steeped in a history of activism and community solidarity, where the past and present collide, Sheen took his audience on an odyssey through Welsh history, identity and concepts of nationhood.

He began with his own moment of epiphany, a glimpse of his first television interview recorded straight out of drama school in which he saw the shape-shifting impact living away from Wales had made on him. After failing to make himself understood in his strong Welsh accent in a London McDonald’s, he “assimilated”.

“I didn’t want my difference to be something that was defined by other people. I wanted to be in control of it. And so I started adapting, shifting my shape to hide the difference so I could control when it was seen or not,” he recalled.

Seeing the result of that chameleon behaviour years later unnerved the more mature Sheen: “When I was just finished at drama school and starting my first job, I did my very first ever TV interview. It was for a Welsh news programme and all about a young Welsh actor making a splash starring opposite Vanessa Redgrave in the West End. Not long ago I was at my mum and dad’s house with my daughter and we came across a video recording of that interview.

“Seeing that interview was quite a shocker. As I watched, trying to ignore the howls of laughter coming from my daughter, I had absolutely no idea who that person was. He clearly had no idea who he was either. He had a big hoop earring in his left ear, a pseudo-confidence bordering on arrogance and he certainly didn’t sound Welsh. To be honest I’m surprised people weren’t constantly coming up to me and giving me a slap. It’s amazing the effect that not being understood in a London McDonald’s can have on someone’s life.

(Image: Rob Browne)

“In those three years, I’d clearly done a real job on myself. It wasn’t that I was trying to hide where I came from. I wasn’t embarrassed about being Welsh or anything like that. I think I just realised, without it ever having to be said, that I was faced with an utterly overwhelming and totally implacable field of ‘otherness’ all around me, towering above me. Like a huge wave rising up, pushed forward by unseen but dimly visible forces that I knew would roll me over without a second’s hesitation. And I found I had very little to hold onto to resist its ineluctable current. On some level, without being aware of it, I decided I would turn and swim with the current. I would leave negotiating my difference until later, once I’d learned how to swim with the racing tide.

“It took me a very long time to even begin to understand the consequences of how you respond to having your sense of difference be defined by others. The difficulties it can create around developing a genuine sense of identity; the ways it can disconnect you from your past. My difference, my Welshness, was first presented to me in the form of a shock from outside – a crisis of recognition. And I responded with a form of assimilation and accommodation that I thought I was in control of but actually just confused my sense of identity in such a way that it would take me many years to even begin to come to grips with.”

It is a personal experience that is writ large for Wales itself. Sheen moves from individual anecdote to our universal experience as Welsh people, illustrating the impact “having your sense of difference being defined by others” has made on identity and nationhood.

Drawing on a timeline from the Romans to Brexit, he charts the story of Wales, and reiterates Raymond Williams’ question Who Speaks For Wales, explaining: “Without some kind of understanding of that story and its tortured history we cannot even begin to start answering that question, so full of contradictions, because it is the story of a nation that never was, struggling to be. The story of a people continually shocked and shaped and acted upon from outside. It is the story of a long process of successive conquests and repressions, of bitter fighting and raiding and discrimination. But also of accommodations and integrations and adaptations.”

I can’t do justice to the detail of Sheen’s argument on this single page so I would urge you to seek the full lecture out online – he has uploaded it to YouTube.

When Sheen reaches journey’s end in contemporary Wales, he asks uncomfortable questions of how current politicians across the spectrum, not to mention the print, digital and broadcast media of today are “speaking for Wales” as a London-based media dominates while local newspapers decline and screen time given to indigenous programming recedes.

His criticism is valid and necessary. And while those of us who work in the media are reluctant to turn the journalistic scrutiny we hold dear upon ourselves – oh the irony – the faults should be acknowledged and acted upon if we are to address the democratic deficit that damages Wales.

Who speaks for Wales? Raymond Williams’ question resonates as loudly as ever. Michael Sheen certainly does, in a voice that captivates, provokes and inspires. But as he draws on Williams’ wisdom in his conclusion it’s clear we can’t leave it all to a solo performer, even one of Sheen’s talents: “Whenever we can, join our voices together to help create a Wales that is our ‘own world’.”

Michael Sheen’s Annual Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture can be seen in full on YouTube here .