DYLAN THOMAS’S PLAY FOR RADIO

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27374, 12 June 1954, Page 3

DYLAN THOMAS’S PLAY FOR RADIO

Under Milk Wood. A Play for Voices. By Dylan Thomas. Preface and Musical Settings by Daniel Jones. Dent. 101 pp.

As Dylan Thomas’s last work, published posthumously, this play for radio is bound to receive a good deal of publicity. Although it would be unfair to criticise it as if it were the poet’s consciously delivered final statement, it did occupy him intermittently for 10 years, and it reflects his essential view of life. This view of life.is neither very serious nor very mature. But “Under Milk Wood” reflects also what was serious about Dylan Thomas —his preoccupation with craftsmanship. As an experiment in technique, his play for voices (designed to be heard rather than read) is both interesting ana accomplished. And as a revelation of his gift for bawdy humour and gay irreverence, it is a delightful performance. His rhetorical eloquence and the relish and cunning oj his use of words are as masterly as in the verse. , „ The play presents tpe lives of the citizens in a small Welsh seaside town named Llaregyb from one night-time to the next, with their dreams and recollections, lecheries, malice, .gossip and frustration. The generous m love, the eccentrics and the dispossessed are set on one side, while on the other are the puritanical, the narrowly conventional, the hypocrites and the coldhearted As Mr Daniel Jones describes in his preface, this follows the lines of an earlier play projected by Dylan Thomas called “The Town was Mad. This was to end with a trial of the sanity of the town in which the last speech for the prosecution would describe in detail the “ideally sane” town of pure conformity, and would be followed by the citizens’ withdrawal of their defence and their immediate petition “to be cordoned off from the sane world as soon as possible.” This plan was finally abandoned for the simpler version finally presented to the 8.8. C. a month before the poet’s death, and has since been presented by a distinguished all-Welsh cast. The play calls for skilled production and manipulation of the many voices involved: there are two narrators (First Voice and Second Voice), choruses of neighbours, and voices of citizens constantly fading in and out in dialogue or soliloquy. The technique is an adaption of that used in many popular comic radio shows: FIRST VOICE From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-* keeper, dream of SECOND VOICE her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderboltbass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body. MR EDWARDS Myfanwy Price! MISS PRICE Mr Mog Edwards.

MR EDWARDS I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merine, tussore, cretonne, crepon. muslin, poplin, ticking, and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. T have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

It is excellent fun and cleverly contrived. Only a final accounting, after the merriment is over, will discover that a positive philosophy of life is lacking from Dylan Thomas’s last work. He “sees through” respectability, he knows that husbands, sometimes want to murder their wives, and that young women are often lascivious, but in the end his clever but essentially unconnected little scenes seem to add up—in his own words—to little more than “titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dr dams.”