This was the Hampstead Players first visit to Milk Wood since 1981, when a fully-staged production was mounted in the church. For this return trip, director Bill Risebero opted for a ‘live-broadcast style reading’ of Dylan Thomas’s much-loved story of the inhabitants of the fictional Welsh port-town of Llareggub, going about their daily lives one Spring day. Spring it was not in Hampstead, and with the mercury well below zero it was a chilly night to be out wandering the streets, peering into the ‘blinded bedrooms’ of the ‘lulled and dumbfound town’, but the warmth and obvious delight of the performers kept off the chill.
Our guides for this tour of the thoughts and dreams of the people of Llareggub were three Voices (rather than the two designated in the script), superbly performed by Joyce Rose, James Pellow and Judy Burgess, who brought the perfect blend of lyricism and humour to Thomas’s words, effortlessly riding the rhythms and cadences running just beneath the surface of the text.
As the Voices set up the sequence of vignette scenes that make up the play, the twenty-three actors stepped into the semicircular performance area to bring to life more than sixty characters – to a uniformly high standard. Among such a strong ensemble, it seems invidious to pick out individual performances, but highlights for me included the passion of Matthew Williams’s ardent draper Mog Edwards, and the poignant exchange between Bill Fry’s blind, loss-haunted Captain Cat and his dream girl Rosie (Gaynor Bassey). Patrice Dorling was formidable as house-proud harridan Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, striking terror into the hearts of her two late husbands (Harold Frankel and David Gardner), even from beyond the grave. Polly Garter’s plaintive refrain for dead Willie Wee, the only one of her many lovers with a place in her heart, was simply and beautifully sung by Sarah Day.
The well-known scene in which the Pughs dine on ‘cold grey cottage pie’ while Mr Pugh longingly plots the murder of his wife, was a particular joy. Stephen Tucker’s hyena eye as he ‘sidespied’ Bonnie Taylor’s acid-tongued Mrs Pugh was enough to put me off ever accepting an invitation to supper at the vicarage. But although there were many fine individual performances to be savoured, the old truism that there are no small parts, only small actors, was proved once more, as the minor characters sparkled with a vitality that matched that of the more attention-grabbing roles. For me, the piece came most alive in the crowd scenes – the gossiping housewives of the town; the singing schoolchildren (expertly drilled by Barbara Alden); the drowned sailors of Captain Cat’s dreams – in which Thomas’s deceptively simple dialogue was delivered with a precision, character and wit that spoke of thorough, sensitive direction and much careful rehearsal.
Projected images of Welsh life and live sound effects helped to create a sense of location, but Under Milk Wood is more than a play about place; more even than a play about people. It is a powerful sense of community, that strange mixture of both, which is the heart of Thomas’s masterpiece, and, from their first entrance to the hummed strain of ‘Bread of Heaven’ to their final bow, the actors created a living, breathing community that, for all its members’ eccentricities, was never anything less than totally believable.
Under Milk Wood- Review
Ben Horslen