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All sound and furies
A "new" radio version of Under Milk Wood seems like an elegy for two tortured talents
By Ian Johns
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DYLAN THOMAS’S “play for voices” Under Milk Wood is probably the one set text for which pupils would gain marks for admitting they had studied only the audio version. But then the poet’s booming, overripe language has always worked best when heard; his best-known poem, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, written for his dying father, is about rage, failure and hatred of God, yet its lilting rhythms still make it popular at funerals and memorial services.
No wonder during Thomas’s short life (1914-1953) it was BBC Radio that kept commissioning him. And thanks to the patience of a BBC producer, Douglas Cleverdon, who coaxed the pages from him over seven years, we got Thomas’s most famous work.

Under Milk Wood was first broadcast in January 1954. A dream-like montage of a day in the fictional Llareggub, it begins with Richard Burton’s now famous narration, ominous as rolling thunder, conjuring up a “starless and Bible-black” spring night in the seaside town, sloping to the “sloeblack, slow, black, crow-black, fishing boat-bobbing sea”. Women gossip at the pump, the Crippen-like Mr Pugh plots to poison his wife and the clock in the Sailors’ Arms is permanently stuck at half-past-eleven opening time. The sightless seadog Captain Cat dreams of drowned seamen. Mrs Willy Nilly steams open her lodger’s letters. The local trollop, Polly Garter, sings “I loved a man whose name was Tom/ He was strong as a bear and two yards long”.

Above all, this is a place of noise, with “herring gulls heckling down to the harbour”, dogs that “bark blue in the face” and clocks “tocking the earth away”.

As part of a BBC season marking the 50th anniversary of Thomas’s death, Radio 4 presents a fresh version of Under Milk Wood on Saturday. Well, not entirely fresh. Burton’s principal narration from a 1963 reprise of the play has been spruced up digitally and woven seamlessly into new performances by, among others, Siân Phillips, Glyn Houston, even John Humphrys. Although the producer Alison Hindell had planned a completely new production, Radio 4’s controller, Helen Boaden, thought it inconceivable without Burton’s voice.

This is most odd. Under Milk Wood has spawned numerous Burton-free versions, ranging from solo shows, notably by Burton’s great-nephew Guy Masterson, to such elaborate stagings as Roger Michell’s 1995 National Theatre production, complete with flying beds and miniature illuminated houses. And just reissued is a two-CD version, produced by George Martin in 1988, with Anthony Hopkins’s dulcet tones replacing Burton’s and a starry cast that includes Jonathan Pryce, Tom Jones, and Geraint Evans as an operatic Rev Eli Jenkins.

Martin’s production eschews intimacy for elaborate orchestrations and underscorings by the likes of Elton John and Mark Knopfler: in Hindell’s version we’re almost eavesdropping on Polly Garter’s singing; in Martin’s we have Bonnie Tyler rasping out a soft-rock version. Martin argues that since Thomas had hoped to work with Stravinsky, he would have welcomed more music. But in a 1946 BBC radio discussion, Thomas said: “All a reader of poems should do is to use his voice in the place of your eyes.”

Hearing him on the audio collection Dylan Thomas at the BBC, one finds his own voice deep and sonorous, carrying only the slightest hint of his Welsh upbringing. In the style of the South Wales middle class at the time, young Dylan was sent to elocution lessons by his parents, the teacher Jack Thomas and his wife Florrie, who couldn’t pass a Welsh dresser without wanting to dust it. This voice made him a popular reader of poetry, and he appeared in many radio programmes not scripted by him. Conversely, he did not appear in all the programmes he wrote for the BBC between 1937 and 1953.

He did, however, perform in a New York reading of Under Milk Wood in May 1953. By this time, though, Thomas was a disconsolate figure, his American lecture tours a blur of wine, women and recited song. He was also apt to parody his own Bible-black thesaurus style, something his equally unstable wife Caitlin may have noted; at a private reading of an early draft of Under Milk Wood, she described the play as a “bloody pot-boiler”.

To this day there is disagreement about what sort of Welshness is portrayed by Thomas’s seaside citizens. Are the spick-and-span widow Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and the bibulous tenors in the Sailors’ Arms part of a reductive caricaturing of the Welsh as lechers, puritans and drunks? Or is it, as the mischievously spelt-backwards town of Llareggub suggests, a sly parody?

Whatever the intention, Under Milk Wood has set an indelible image of the Welsh as lyrical, dark and brooding. Thomas himself forged a new image of the tortured poet as a chain-smoking womaniser with a rip in his tweeds. Like Elvis, for many he has become more of a myth than an artist.

Listening to an aurally crisp Richard Burton in Hindell’s Under Milk Wood, which, for all its spookier-sounding spectral seamen, stays pretty faithful to Cleverdon’s original conception, one’s reminded of another wayward Welsh talent. Burton, making audiences swoon as Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1954, took over the First Voice role intended for Thomas after his death from booze and medical confusions in New York in November 1953.

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On the Dylan Thomas trail in Wales
A new biopic will bring the Welsh poet to life, and his old stomping grounds - Swansea and LaugharneMarc Zakian


DYLAN called it his ‘ugly, lovely, town',” Pat tells me in her sonorous South Wales lilt, “and from here you can see why.”

We are standing on Mount Pleasant, a hill overlooking a Victorian cityscape reshaped by the Blitz and 1970s concrete. Despite the attentions of the Luftwaffe and myopic town planners, Swansea's soul is intact, bustling to the musical chatter of a people immortalised in the poetry of its greatest son: Dylan Thomas.

Like a doomed 1960s rock star, Thomas's artistic brilliance, booze-sodden life and early death at the age of 39 continue to fuel the public's fascination with him. This Friday a Hollywood biopic on the poet, The Edge of Love, starring Matthew Rhys, Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley, goes on release in the UK.

Pat Hughes is my guide to Wales's most famous son, and to the city where he grew up. She is a walking one-woman show of Thomas fact, folklore and off-the-cuff recitals, and was appointed an MBE for her efforts. She will take you to the house where he grew up (5, Cwmdonkin Drive), the pub where he discovered the “bright, brass depths” of beer (Uplands Tavern) and around a city that champions its wayward son with monuments, theatres, a festival and the Dylan Thomas Centre, which houses a permament exhibition.


Thomas left Swansea aged 20, but later returned to Wales with his wife, Caitlin, to write. Two places, in particular, inspired his masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, a “play for voices” set in a seaside town called Llareggub (“bugger all” spelt backwards.)

Thomas and Caitlin were conspicuous characters in the quiet fishing village of New Quay on the Cambrian coast, where they lived in 1944 and 1945. New Quay today is still an old-fashioned bucket-and-spade town of whitewashed Gwely y Brecwast (bed and breakfast) houses. Dylan's main watering hole, the Black Lion Hotel, bears a quote from Under Milk Wood: “Time passes. Listen. Time Passes.” In New Quay, I'm not sure that it does.

If one place captures the soul of Dylan more than anywhere else, it must be “the timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings)” village of Laugharne, in southern Carmarthenshire - the other main inspiration for Llareggub. Thomas joked that he got off the bus here, and forgot to get back on. It's not difficult to see why: a writer could not wish for a more romantic and inspiring setting.

Thomas loved his Laugharne boathouse, which he called a “seashaken house on a breakneck of rocks”. The boathouse is a museum now, preserved as it was in the poet's time. Exhibits bring his life and the period vividly to life.

Thomas lived in Laugharne from 1949 until his death four years later. His body was flown back from New York, where he died after a whisky binge during a lecture tour, for burial in Laugharne's parish church.

A simple white cross stands at the centre of the graveyard. Pilgrims bring tributes, from a white plastic toy horse to an empty whisky bottle. Dylan Thomas is here in spirit.

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The Welsh playGlyn Maxwell

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Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood. Olivier Theatre. That the Welsh poet, at the earliest, most tentative, give-me-some-money-or- I'll-never-get-this-done stage of what became Under Milk Wood, subtitled the work "Llareggub: A piece for radio perhaps" is all the validation necessary for the literally minded not a tribe particularly well disposed to Dylan Thomas at the best of times to declare the piece unstageable, unworkable and as impervious to logical visualization as was its creator to most other forms of rational conduct.

In fact, given the shadows of scepticism that cloud the brow of many an English playgoer faced with the prospect of actually having to see Captain Cat, Gossamer Benyon, No Good Boyo and the Mrs Dai Breads, one may as well nervously dub it "the Welsh play" and sit back smugly to expect the worse. This is confused thinking. One doesn't have to cite the example of Peer Gynt, which has worked splendidly on stage, or any of the rest of Ibsen, which does fine for radio; the argument that the visual somehow undermines verbal richness is comprehensively destroyed by Shakespeare. John Barber, of the Daily Express, greeted the original play on its arrival in London after a triumphant 1956 premiere at the Edinburgh Festival, with the words: "I warn you: people often speak their thoughts aloud in odd clotted language," which could be any modern-day English teacher dipping a toe into Macbeth with a stony-faced third form, not to mention some 1660s punter trying to get a dubious Samuel Pepys to come and see The Winter's Tale.

But the play's own history tends to disprove the "radio play" argument. Widely performed and translated, Under Milk Wood has had a comparatively happy experience of bedding down into the English theatre, smoother a passage, in fact, than Thomas's verse is having in English literature. The first stage production, with Donald Houston in what became the Burton role of First Voice (and as Mrs Cherry Owen, incidentally, Buddug Mair Powell, my mother), was almost unaminously applauded "the beauty of it, the fun of it, the Welshness of it!" gushed the News Chronicle, in the days when that particular quality was a plus with the popular newspapers. Kenneth Tynan, who asked of the "radio play" contingent, "do they . . . go blindfold to symphony concerts?" located its true ancestor in the most glorious of Ben Jonson's situation comedies:

We are gripped, as in comedy we have immemorially been gripped, by a bunch of characters with one-track minds who, though they incessantly collide with one another never make any real contact. Not less than Bartholomew Fair, Under Milk Wood is a true comedy of humours.

What causes Wales to have such a play in this century, and England generally to settle for small groups of sad men in rooms brokenly stating the obvious, is also the reason why Shakespeare is now a museum, why new writers catch the eye by gouging it out, and why virtually all our theatres are corporate versions of the poor men with cardboard signs who wait for play-goers on the path home from the Olivier. One either believes in stage art as art as dream, as creation, as beauty or one doesn't. If one doesn't, fine: make it an industry, run it like an economy, let stand-up comics and would-be film-makers do the writing and cram the stage with punch-lines and catch-phrases. Make it easy or make it bloody, make us laugh, give us as fine a time as television. Fund it with a lottery. And so on.

The best thing about the National's Under Milk Wood, then, is that it's there.

For all its omissions, a story, a climax, a point turn Llareggub upside-down to find it what Tynan called Thomas's "sexy, sun-blessed nonsense-burg" is back, in all its slow, black sloeblack glory, on a big stage in the wisecracking, cynical grey London of The Late Show and The Modern Review and Martin's teeth and Naomi's novel and thousands queuing to hear Quentin Tarantino say he kind of likes movies. All of the next best things about the production relate to Roger Michell's faith in the life of Llareggub not as drama, or poetry, but as human truth, as the wildest fiction telling the oldest facts. If it's true to the human, it doesn't matter into which vessel humanity has chosen to pour it (a book, a stage, a machine for transmitting sound, a gadget for creating the illusion of movement), and it certainly doesn't matter from which group of humans Welsh, English, Indian, Amerindian it originates.

What does matter, on the other hand, is when one culture tries to appropriate another, but not hard enough. For the New York run, when the Welsh actors were, at the insistence of US Equity, largely replaced by Americans and their hazily reverent take on all things Celtic, the play opened to the rapturous applause of, among others, No l Coward and Marlene Dietrich, only to be promptly minced by Walter Kerr and the generally baffled "Butchers of Broadway": "At root, a piece of music . . ." "This play is for the few . . ." and, from the New York Mirror, "The Welsh are a practical yet quaintly moonstruck people, a realistic yet eloquent people", an observation which could have come straight from Under Milk Wood's Voice of a Guide Book, whom Michell has, hilariously, winched into the flies still droning: "The River Dewi is said to abound in trout, but is much poached . . .".

The show is strong on this sort of comedy, and strong on all the delightful, mucky sexuality that was played down in the primmer 1950s. Michell and the designer William Dudley have found simple and often beautiful correspondences for many of the play's best moments. Willy-Nilly Postman and his wife steam open letters beside a surreally huge kettle, No Good Boyo's masturbatory agitation occurs half-in, half-out of a manhole, where he's undone "in a Japanese minute", while blind Captain Cat has Odyssean dreams of his drowned shipmates, who bob up and down on ropes around his airborne bed: "Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very enjoyable . . .". The famous scene, Thomas's favourite, in which the ghost of Captain Cat's lover, Rosie Probert, appears, here likewise suspended from on high only to tell him, "I have forgotten you . . . I have forgotten I was ever born" dissolves into the shockingly different perspective of a schoolgirl (the excellent Lisa Palfrey) seeing the old sailor weeping at the window of the Schooner House "He's got a nose like strawberries!" but then reaches high above pathos into pure tragedy with the words of the First Voice: ". . . the child says, and then she forgets him too".

For my money, this is one of the best moments in any century of our drama, and the production, with the visual risks it takes, and its thoughtful, focused performances, does it justice.

Such peaks of this Under Milk Wood are high enough to make the troughs doubly disappointing. One of the culprits is where we came in, the radio, and the other is, rather spookily, Thomas himself. The show begins with an old wireless and with old wireless sound fair enough, a tribute to its origins but the whole section Michell stages as a radio broadcast, having the cast sit on the stage behind Captain Cat, as he "sees" by sound, is misconceived. Apart from the fact that this stasis disturbs the winding, river-like flow of the daytime, it further creates a sense of unity among the villagers that is really quite absent from the gallery of lonely hearts and loopy obsessives who constitute Llareggub, but worse a sense of unity among the actors-playing-villagers, which turns to a sense of complicity in the artifice of the stage itself. This is not the moment, and not the play, and not the country in which to make that kind of neat postmodernist point.

Which brings us to the actually rather unnerving apparition of Dylan Thomas himself, in the form of Mark Lewis Jones good as he is playing Cherry Owen.

Jones looks and sounds so like Thomas, or like our frozenly remembered Thomas, that it's impossible not to run the implications to their extremes, all of which are dissatisfying. For one thing, if Cherry Owen and his wife were intended as a portrait of Thomas and Caitlin Macnamara, all roaring drunkenness and loving forgiveness "And then you did a little dance on the table" "I did?" it is a painfully wishful one. Thomas, whatever else he deceived himself about, was well aware of what he was and had for a lover. In any case, it makes no dramatic sense. If Cherry Owen is the happy sinner at the heart of Llareggub, identical with Dylan in Laugharne, then whose are the Voices? Michell detaches the two of them from the village so skilfully, and Nicholas McGaughey and Rhys Ifans play them with such a winning blend of remote, avuncular kindness like Wim Wenders's Berlin-cruising seraphim in Wings of Desire that the last thing one wants to be reminded of is all the painstaking research the author took in the hostelries of Laugharne while progressing towards Llareggub. Besides, there is already enough in the play sadly to remind one why the real heights that it suggests were in Thomas's reach as a playwright would never be scaled. Under Milk Wood describes a single spring day: most of it is aubade. The morning is long, afternoon over too quickly, the evening barely happens. Lector, si monumentum requiris . . . .

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