Alistair McGowan does a sterling job in Under Milk Wood at The Watermill – review

Dylan Thomas was amusingly caustic about the Coronation. Arriving in London from New York on June 3 1953, he recalled his progress through miles of festive detritus in a letter which confirmed that his descriptive powers remained in rude health even as his body wilted under the toxic influence of drink and drugs.

“I crawled as early as sin in the chilly weeping morning through the city’s hushed hangover,” he mock-rhapsodised, noting “all the spatter and bloody gravy and giant mouse-mess that go to show how a loyal and phlegmatic people [...] enjoyed themselves like hell the day before.” He died in New York on November 9.

Thomas’s final opus, Under Milk Wood, the “play for voices” that set the seal on his reputation as a literary giant of the Welsh valleys, has, then, endured as long as the reign of Elizabeth II. When we read it now, or listen to it (most likely in the BBC recordings made with Richard Burton) or, on occasion, see it on stage, a treat currently being granted us in Newbury, it’s hard not to regard it as a museum piece in which the statues magically come to life. 

Described by the author as “prose with blood pressure”, it eavesdrops on the fictional seaside town of Llareggub, across a daily cycle from sleep to wake and back again to slumber. It brims over with childlike, wide-eyed wonder and, for all its larky, at times teasingly erotic, verbal comedy, a wise-old-man’s melancholy awareness of mortality.

The dramatis personae are haunted by memories, stalked by ghosts, indeed some of them are the departed (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”) and this swooping bird’s-eye-view of a close-knit community (the town’s name reads as “bugger all” backwards) feels like an anticipatory epitaph for a whole way of life.

True, you may well find in parts of Wales many vestigial traces of the gossiping neighbourliness, the daffy eccentricity too, that Dylan quasi-documents. Yet to lose yourself in Under Milk Wood is to mourn, by default, an imparted sense of communal identity. This is a cohesive society, the poem suggests; however “unreal” its characters – blind “Captain Cat”, postman “Willy-Nilly”, sweetshop lady Myfanwy Price, dozens more – they are tangible to each other, out of reach to us.

It seems to me that British theatre has never quite known what to do with Under Milk Wood. It didn’t usher in a reign of verse drama despite much flag-waving for it at the time (“The greatest drama is poetic drama,” T S Eliot wrote in 1929, and tried to practise what he preached). The Beatles were openly indebted to Thomas (Bessie Bighead, “alone until she dies”, is, you might say, the town’s Eleanor Rigby).

But the combination of the Fifties “kitchen-sink” revolution, the decline of deference and rise too of an inverted snobbery towards the phrase poetical left the tide going out on Thomas’s experiment. Our playwrights tend to show us how things fall apart, not hark melodiously back to a time when the centre held. Brendan O’Hea’s committed, intelligent revival brings Under Milk Wood back to the Watermill – which opened with it in 1967 – and reveals it in all its magnificence and flaws.

Thomas’s word-music is beautiful and overwhelming: you may latch onto salient phrases (I loved “the chimneys’ slow upflying snow”) while others slip past. In bible-black roll-neck jumper, Alistair McGowan Houdini-escapes his reputation for celebrity impressions, performing a sterling, serious job in the sage narratorial role, exhorting us to listen, summoning the townsfolk from the darkness.

Another five cast members (among them a highly promising Steffan Cennydd, newly graduated from Guildhall, a Richard Burton prize to his name too) dart around the auditorium and dive impressively from character to character.

If you can’t always see the wood for the trees, it’s more than the sum of its parts too. The bravura of its ambition still throws down a gauntlet which our poets and playwrights, confronting the current mood of national uncertainty, might be more inclined than ever to pick up.

It was to Carol Ann Duffy that Rufus Norris turned this year for the Brexit response My Country, and the big state-of-the-nation plays on the National’s stage of late have had a decidedly (if not always satisfactorily) poetical tint to them. Is it possible that, as with the beginning so with the end of Elizabeth’s reign, new “plays for voices” will emerge from Thomas’s shadow?

Until Nov 4. Tickets: 01635 46044; watermill.org.uk