THINK of Dylan Thomas and, unless you are a poetry scholar, the chances are you will hear the voice of Richard Burton in your head, reading words from Under Milk Wood. Now, if you are one of the few fortunate ticket holders for the new Emma Rice Company production at the Lucky Chance in Frome, a new voice and new words will fill your ears. The voice is Katy Owen’s and the words those of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Rice’s new theatrical adaptation of this evocative narrative runs to 21st December, and was sold out before the opening night. The first show made specifically for the venue, a former Methodist chapel bought by the company in 2022, this will probably be the most unusual and exciting new Christmas production anywhere in the country.

With a cast of four actors and an on-stage musician, this hour-long show offers full-on entertainment combined with humour, pranks, audience participation, nostalgia, indelibly-made cameo characterisations, intense longing and grief, fear and the warmth of a family home with a roaring fire and the lights of the festive season. It does this without a single “celebrity (def: people very full of their own importance that you have never heard of called “sslebritees” by a fawning presenter.)

Emma Rice has a remarkable imagination, and honed her theatrical skills in two decades with Kneehigh. They are distilled in this wondrous and magical show, which will have you singing in Welsh by the end … fear not! This is the story of Dylan Thomas’s childhood. Born in 1914, three months into the First World War, it charts his memories of friends, pets, vistas, tipsy singing aunts, monosyllabic uncles, the excitement of Christmas … the games you could play … the sweets you could eat (remember those horrible chewy sugar cigarettes?).

The vignettes can be heart-breaking and life-affirming, transporting the audience to a recent history that moulded Wales’s greatest poet. Many of his best-known works were written in his late teenage years and his extraordinary output has etched the idea of the Welsh countryside and its inhabitants in our collective consciousness. In New York in 1952, he made his first vinyl recordings, one of which was A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which not only became his most popular prose work in America but is said to have launched the audiobook industry in the United States.

This production, which has the stupendously versatile and talented Welsh-born Katy Owen at its heart, also features Tom Fox, Simon Oskarsson and Robyn Sinclair playing the myriad other characters, two and four legged, real and mythical. As the children rampage through the village and out into the fields, there is ever-marvellous snow – and a chance for everyone in the audience to enjoy it, in a timeless, universal story, told in a unique way that will creep into your soul.

I hope for you that your ticket is booked. Otherwise I can only recommend that you sign up for returns and keep your fingers tightly crossed.

GP-W

After her 20 years with Cornish-based Kneehigh, in 2016 Emma Rice moved to take over Shakespeare’s Globe, but quit within two years after a well-publicised debacle which might have been about lighting and sound amplification, to set up a new company, Wise Children, in Bristol. Its first production, also called Wise Children, opened at Bristol Old Vic … and then came COVID. It was as Wise Children that Emma and her eager and devoted band of actors and other supporters moved to Frome, but in September there was another name change. The Wise Children have claimed their parent’s name and are now The Emma Rice Company, to remove the confusion that this is a children’s theatre company.