Under
Milk Wood
Paul Davies explains the thinking behind Volcano Theatre Company's production
of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood
Volcano has just finished touring a production of Under Milk
Wood. Now that the tour has been completed I feel better able to
assess some of the real and fictitious problems that we had to face.
Of course there were the usual difficulties that affect all, or most,
theatre productions. Problems in Macedonia meant the Albanian National
Theatre of Minorities based in Skopje could not collaborate, as we had
planned, on the project. Partly as a result of our own financial situation
(Volcano were not originally funded by the Arts Council of Wales to
make the show) rehearsal time was cut to three weeks. The director joined
us with only two weeks to go; at the preview people walked out shortly
after "To begin at the beginning" had begun! The local newspaper printed
a hostile letter concerning the performance; some members of the Arts
Council came to see the show and didn't like it and finally Thomas's
agents declared that we had no right to adapt the text in any way. The
usual local difficulties then!
In a more positive fashion I suppose I should add that the production
was something of a success. Over 1,200 people came to see it at the
Grand in Swansea, there were sell-out performances in Cardiff, Aberystwyth,
around England and in Stuttgart, Germany. The production has also been
invited to London's South Bank and to tour Romania and Turkey by the
British Council.
Apart from these particular problems, Under Milk Wood gave Volcano,
which has been based in Swansea for more than 10 years, a chance to
re-assess the significance of Thomas' most famous work. This reassessment
was not done in any systematic sense - rather it emerged during the
course of our attempts to theatricalise Under Milk Wood. To oversimplify
the matter, I would say that we began with some hostility towards Milk
Wood and ended with a great deal more sympathy. I should like, briefly,
to chart this journey.
Under Milk Wood occupies an ambivalent place within Anglo-Welsh
culture. It is by turns celebrated and vilified. Within the City of
Swansea itself that ambivalence is clear for all to see. Thomas features
upon a pretty awful mural that greets the visitor by train, there are
a couple of statues, a moribund amateur theatre company and a Dylan
Thomas Centre that appears to attract its fair share of consultancy
reports which no doubt begin with the question: "Does Dylan Thomas mean
any thing to this City?" Does he indeed?! A local politician of some
repute thought he knew the answer to this question - it was, he claimed,
only the English who read Thomas. There is, however, a very good second-hand
bookshop - Dylan's Bookstore run by the indefatigable Jeff Towns.
Perhaps David Holbrook would have agreed. In his view (Llareggub
Revisited, 1962) Thomas' popularity could be attributed to the growth
of a repressed, lower middle class, suburban population. Who knows?
All those wicked wirelesses! Post-war democracy cost us dear, although
I wonder how much more this class must answer for.
Volcano had no great wish or desire to disturb the neat net curtains
of these arguments. And I suppose in truth we didn't. Thomas will always
have his passionate supporters and his inveterate opponents. In the
theatre our starting point was to accept the contradictory nature of
Under Milk Wood. We considered that the central question was what
kind of place was this Under Milk Wood? (This seemed to us to
be rather a different type of question than an enquiry into how representative
Milk Wood was of the varied and complex Welsh constituencies.) Where
was it? And why was it like it was? We found some kind of answer to
these questions from within the territory of utopian vision and thought.
Under Milk Wood was not to be found in Llareggub, Laugharne or
some other suitably isolated West Walian town. Rather it was nowhere
- and nowhere in the sense of its utopian, other worldly aspects. Under
Milk Wood appeared to me to mix its utopian sources. It was arcadian,
a land of cockaigne, a rural fantasy of abundance, happiness (even when
individual goals were thwarted), sexual freedom and general ease. (Utopia
and tHe Ideal Society, J.C. Davis, 1981)
Within the general terms of this utopian vision it is not difficult
to see how Thomas's work could be assimilated to a tradition of homily,
nostalgia and polite retreat. (William Morris's News from Nowhere
has, in a similar fashion, often been read as a medieval fantasy, the
product of a man and a mind unable to come to terms with a developing
modernism) In defence of Thomas however, one can say that within the
range of his intentions, retreat was simply one option.
As Walford Davies makes clear in his introduction to the new Everyman
edition Thomas had very different plans. Volcano took Thomas's outline
for a very different Under Milk Wood as the basis for their theatre
production. We subtitled our theatre piece "The Town that Was Mad".
Thomas's early provisional title for Under Milk Wood. In addition we
concentrated on the darker side of the characters that Thomas had invented.
One result of this was that, in the words of The Western Mail,
we had "rip(ped) away the cosy veneer of Milk Wood to reveal the devil
in its inhabitants, devils common to us all". This may have been in
keeping with Thomas's proposed intention to extend the night sequence
and demonstrate that the inhabitants of Milk Wood were far from content
with their life in this the "strangest town in Wales". To that end Thomas
had, as is well known, conceived of putting the town on trial as a place
of obvious insanity. This device would have enabled an audience to consider
the attraction, or otherwise of Milk Wood and in turn examine, by way
of contrast, the desirability of their/our own lives.
For all sorts of reasons Thomas did not write into Milk Wood
any of these scenarios. They remain possibilities latent within the
work. For Volcano, however, they were vital interpretative tools with
which we could restore a more critical utopian edge to the theatre production.
Our presentation of Under Milk Wood was sentimental, romantic
and on occasions lyrical but it was also something more. It was an active
utopia engaging with our lives - rather than presenting an ahistorical
dream play. The characters were dysfunctional, anarchic, lost, dangerous
and every so often just plain mad.
Certainly our production failed to illuminate a specifically Welsh component
to Under Milk Wood. We preferred to present it as a still-born
experiment in the utopian mode. The price the inhabitants of Milk Wood
paid for their utopian vision was not the timeless ease of a rural idyll,
but the terrible knowledge that as surely as this life has its lighter
and darker sides, it must also be a life that will soon change forever.
Paul Davies
Published in New Welsh Review #35, Winter 1996
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