UNDER MILK WOOD
Under Milk Wood was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation but tried out in the spring of 1953 in a New York concert reading (later released on record) that starred Thomas himself, along with such American actors as Sada Thompson. By the time the play was broadcast on BBC radio in early 1954, with Thomas’s fellow Welshman Richard Burton in the lead, the poet was dead. (This production, probably unintentionally, coincides with Thomas’s alcohol-fueled death on November 9, 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday.) As the nature of these earliest performances might indicate, Thomas conceived of the work as “a play for voices,” in which a pair of narrators take the audience on an aural tour of the tiny, dumpy Welsh fishing village of Llareggub, described equally accurately as a “backwater of life” and a “place of love . . . as full as a lovebird’s egg.” Relying on the evocative power of Thomas’s lyrical rhythms and earthy, unorthodox images, the script explores the gulf between the townspeople’s dreary outward existences and their sensual inner lives; it has an imaginative fluidity that–as stage and film productions have often sadly proven–is easily ruined by attempts to bring the material to visual, physical life.
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The residents of Llareggub (the fact that the town’s name is “buggerall” spelled backwards is a fast tip-off to Thomas’s preoccupations with sexuality) are sometimes re-creations and sometimes spoofs of people Thomas knew from childhood. But more important, they’re aspects of the poet himself–expressions of his neediness, his joy in life, his acute sorrow about human frailty and mortality, his fixation on sex as nurturing and destructive.
