Second Dark Time

Well, it's hardly news right now that Madrid Players have entrusted their Spring Classic ( please note : capital S , capital C ) to me, on the basis that I pitched them an unstageable play with far too many characters, no plot and which was never actually finished. Yes, it's this, flying the flag with this poster from el Maestro de Atocha, Aki Ginory  :

Aki does almost all of Madrid Players' posters. The man is a genius, but this time he's excelled himself : I don't think I've ever seen a better poster for UMW.

Over the next six weeks and a day ( yes, I've counted ), I'll try to blog occasionally about the show, and the background, although we'll see if my stamina lasts...

The thinking behind the project ( as far as there was any ) is two-fold. Dylan as  a poet felt that language had gone stale, and that it was almost impossible to say anything new; the poet's job, according to this view, is to make language new by placing familiar words in very unfamiliar contexts, making them explode with new possibilities and new meanings. A trivial example : he writes about the town "head over bells in love." Our job in the show has been to reinvent Under Milk Wood, to remain faithful to Dylan's words and spirit, but present the text in new contexts which breathe life back into it : so it'll still work for people coming to it for the first time, but also ring out new for someone who's heard it a hundred times.

And the other idea ? Since the play gives us many different voices joining together to tell the story of the town, I wanted as many different creative voices in the production as possible. Although it's very technical, it's a real actors' show, which would work as a free-standing piece of street theatre. On top of that, we've brought in a soundscape made up of fragments of traditional Welsh music, performed on harp and fiddle and by the remarkable Côr Chwaraer Madrid, who have learned tipyn bach o Gymraeg ( a little Welsh ) to take part. And I promised myself to say nothing to outsiders about staging, except that if ( fingers crossed ) we carry it off, it'll just be one WOW moment after another ( and possibly the occasional WtF moment as well - one would not wish to become too predictable, after all. )

Enough babble for one evening. This sounds absurdly confident, but then again, I've been in rehearsals and seen what my cast are capable of.

"Dylan affirmed. He said how easy it would be to write poems of defeat and despair, but what he wanted to do was to write poems of joy, and that's of course, what he set out to do in the last poems. And because it's more difficult, it's really more true."

Second Dark Time ? I directed UMW as a social activity-cum-reading in 1996.