AMONGST my most treasured long-playing records is a box containing two LPs of the January 1954 BBC Third Programme broadcast of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood originally described as a play for voices. Some 30 actors, led by Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as the narrators, combined to bring the 60+ named characters who inhabited the wonderful isolated Welsh Village of Llareggub vividly to life.
On stage I have equally strong memories of being taken to see the Bristol Old Vic’s 1957 production, in which I am sure a young Perter O’Toole played blind Captain Cat. My computer supplier of facts and figures disagrees with this recall, denying, despite the fact that O’Toole was a member of the company from 1955 to 1958, that he was in the production. So, rather like the difference of opinion between King Charles and Earl Spencer, you will have to make up your own mind which of us has perfect recall of the facts.
There was no argument about who plays what role on the stage of Bath’s Theatre Royal, because under the direction of Tony Boncza and aided of some expertly-arranged musical intervention by composer Matt Clifford, all alone Guy Masterson takes on the mammoth task of bringing all those characters to life. Although nearly three quarters of a century has passed since that Third Programme broadcast, you have to feel that Guy Masterson at sometime or another talked about Under Milk Wood with his illustrious uncle Richard Burton, which may have sewn the seed for this project into his theatrical mind.
Having already displayed his ability to bring to life the many characters in Peter Flannery’s The Boy’s Own Story, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Guy really throws caution to the wind trying to create the enormous number of characters involved in this story, and at the same time retaining the humour and poetry in Thomas’s beautiful use of language.
Not only has he to deal with the sheer number of characters, but the breadth of age, from Blind Captain Cat to boisterous children, to wide differences of their nature. The painfully abused Polly Garter, easily sexually aroused Rosie Probert, and frustrated school teacher Gossamer Beynon, lovelorn Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards, doomed never to requite their love, Mr Pugh, who purchases a book (The Lives of the Great poisoners), and dreams of poisoning his nasty and undesirable wife, twice-widowed Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard bullying her two dead husbands, The Rev Eli Jenkins dreaming of Eisteddfods, Organ Morgan of conducting a full orchestra in the village, and his wife of silence, alcoholic and trouble making Mr Waldo, to name just a few of the wonderful characters so beautifully and accurately created in Dylan Thomas’ verbal masterpiece. I say accurately because if you draw back the curtains just a little on any small close-knit community, you will find shadows of the inhabitants of Llareggub.
To learn and reproduce two hours of solo dialogue, with only a short interval between each half, with never a hint of fishing for the next line, is a prodigious feat in it’s own right. To do so making expert use of the never-too-dominant musical backing, in a manner to retain the interest of an audience, takes a very special type of theatrical talent.
Whilst freely admitting that I missed the variations that a number of actors like Hugh Griffith, Rachael Roberts, Rachael Thomas, Meredith Edwards and Richard Burton brought to the text, this was a fascinating reintroduction to a verbal masterpiece, by an author who sadly left us with so much more to offer at the age of thirty nine.
You have another chance to see an individual take on the work of DylanThomas between Wednesday 9th and Thursday 24th December, when Emma Rice’s adaptation of his A Child’s Christmas in Wales can be seen in Bath’s Ustinov Studio. And Guy Masterson returns with his solo version of Charles Dickens’ a Christmas Carol in the main house between 14th and 18th December.
GRP