Under Milk Wood

The first night of Malcolm Taylor’s production of Under Milk Wood was a truly heart-warming experience. Already before the play had started, Taylor locates the audience in a relaxed, humorous, and playful atmosphere through the use of the freely flowing Jazz Suite Under Milk Wood (Stan Tracy Quartet).

The actors come in very casually while the Jazz is still playing, take their seats and go to sleep. They later awake in character, as if conjured from the dead to recreate a past both desirable and ridiculous. This transformation breaks down the artificial distinction between actor and character. At the beginning of the play the potential of this concept seemed unfulfilled to me, particularly since the actors were already inhabiting their rather excessive characters; but after the interval, the transformation worked seamlessly.

The overall merit of this production lies in its cast. Taylor stages the piece in accordance with its original function as a radio play. There is no real action. Instead, the actors make full use of expressive movements and strong vocal renditions to bring Thomas’ cornucopia of characters to life. And they succeed marvellously. Each chracter is dinsctintly recognisable, even without resorting to metonymic objects or costume pieces; so much so that the actors’ own physicality is superseded by the way the characters’ bodies inhabit them during their impersonations.

Anne Rutter’s Mrs Dai Bread Two is convincingly sexy and sensual and Howell Evans does an exceptionally good job in his depiction of Mr Pugh as a disgruntled but timid husband. The would-be killer of his wife is himself poisoned from inside by a repression that manifests itself in his grimaces and smiles ‘full of teeth’. Cerith Flynn, still in his last year of acting school, finds a subtle way into Mog Edward’s eternally unfulfilled dreams about Myfanwy Price. Glyn Pritchard is a brilliant Organ Morgan, a man possessed by music. I also loved Jennifer Hill’s ghoulish Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, and Abi Harris’ Polly Garter attained a fine balance between innocence, sexual desire, enjoyment of life, and underlying sadness. Her sad but contained face at the end of the performance, after her delivery of the ‘Six Feet Deep’ song, will stay with me for some time.

Philip Madoc as the First Voice started off slightly weakly. It might be unfair to compare him to Thomas’ rendition of the First Voice (and indeed, vocally the evening felt often very close to that original American recording), but his emotional flatness did not fit in with the overall warmth of the other characters. However, he was later able to create a fittingly ironic distance that created a genuine tension between his point of view and that of the other characters. I also liked the way Taylor juxtaposed Madoc with the younger voice of Gareth Kennerley, even though the Second Voice plays second fiddle to the First.

The overall strength of this production gave little room for shortcomings. But I still wonder why the actors mimed their props when the set they were playing in was detailed and fairly ‘realistic’. I would have preferred real objects to this technically half-hearted physical miming. Another quesionable concept was the use of pre-recorded sound. Its impression was flat and cold in contrast to the characters on stage, who were very much alive. Could the sound effects, at least the human ones, not have been provided by the cast as well?

None of these minor points can detract from the outstanding quality of this production of Under Milk Wood. On the whole, it just felt right.