The Sailors Arms

Tomorrow's Dylan Thomas's birthday, October 27th. 1914, and a few of us will be meeting in the James Joyce pub in Madrid to drink some beer and read some poems for his birthday.I've already blogged fairly extensively about Dylan Thomas and his relationship with pubs back in February; so just a few words more.

Early on last Autumn, farting around on Youtube, I came across this, two minutes of a Scottish TV Cold War thriller with the great Peter Capaldi quoting "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."

In theatre, context is everything.

I knew from here I wanted to set our adaptation of Under Milk Wood inside the White Horse Tavern in New York, which would metamorphose into The Sailors Arms, the pub in Llareggub.  I'd always read this as one of the central passages of UMW  :

"Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms.

SINBAD :  Here's to me, Sinbad."

This is more than a joke about a Village That Time Forgot; and I think it's more than a veteran boozer's fantasy. Pubs are like theatres, or churches, they're spaces which may not be exactly sacred, but space inside is defined like sacred space : you have the threshold, a line that you cross beyond which the rules, the rituals, and the expected behaviour are different. Human relationships work differently inside a pub, in the sense that it's a place which makes everyone equal; and time is measured out in unique ways : time for one more; one for the road; opening and closing time; last orders; and the coveted lock-in. For a man like Dylan, anxious to lose himself and the mess that his adult life had become by the end, it's not hard to see how this could be a kind of sanctuary, a shelter from the storm.

And the Sailors Arms is tended by a shapeshifter, a figure who is simultaneously a bartender and an adventurer from the 1,001 Nights. Inside this pub you can be whoever you want to be : outside there's only reality.

                                         

                                                                

And I've always been taken by the line "The Sailors Arms is always open.", repeated in the play. I've always felt this carries echoes of the story of the Prodigal Son ( and there's no question that Dylan knew his Bible ), establishing this pub as the place you can always return to, no matter what sort of disaster your life is : a place of unjudging love.

We could really have laboured this point in the show, and probably would have, if it had been left to me : fortunately, James and Daryl approached that section of the text through their characters, and what was a joy to one - permanent opening hours - was misery to the other - a life sentence behind the bar. The way they played it worked beautifully, so we left it.

But the earlier idea was why I was cheeky enough to write a little prologue and epilogue for our adaptation   ( borrowing from other Dylan texts) : I wanted to show the bar before the rules of storytelling imposed their logic, and their own way of measuring out time; and I wanted to see what happens when, as it must, the spell is broken, the theatre closes,  the bartender invites the pub raconteur to go home.

In November 1953, when Dylan was lying in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York with no hope of recovery , as the word filtered back home, his friends naturally made their way to the pubs where they used to drink. As Trevor Hughes, a Swansea friend living in London, later told Colin Edwards :

" Only the mean could remember this man in meanness...at the news of his illness I went back to the Fitzroy Tavern, where, I felt, I might get near to him. I had some irrational idea that I was contemplating, not the death of a drunk, but the moving of a great man into the mystic night, and that I, helpless, could only love, and question not, and seek to uphold, even after death."

I tried to hide this text somewhere in our version of the play.

I thought I was being really clever with the White Horse idea, and breaking the fourth wall at the end  ( not that we had much of a fourth wall to start with ) : but watching the last couple of minutes of the recent BBC Wales adaptation, these were clearly just ideas whose time had come.

See you tomorrow !


                                        

 ( Photo of the James Joyce copyright Michael Johnstone - thanks, Mike ! )

This side of the truth

With the Dylan Thomas centenary just round the corner, I thought I'd put this up : it's the poem in Dylan's own hand, from the book "Dylan Thomas : The Pubs", by Jeff Towns ( Y Lolfa ). Kind of focuses the debate about Dylan - it sounds beautiful, and I think full of feeling; a critic would ask if you really need that many words ?  Dylan always worked from the sound of words back towards meaning.

Two Minutes to Midnight

" In late October 1952, the United States proclaimed the successful test of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more destructive than the atomic bombs that had ended the war in the Pacific.  Then in July 1953, the Soviet Union unexpectedly exploded its first hydrogen bomb...The Doomsday Clock, a chilling metaphor whose image appears on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reached two minutes before midnight. The hands would not come as close to midnight again for the rest of the twentieth century."
 -  Jonathan R. Eller, from The Story of Fahrenheit 451.


And if we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch and go.


Under Milk Wood was written at approximately the same time,  and belongs very much to the same period as George Orwell's 1984 or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It might be stretching a point to see the structure of the play, the period of light between two darknesses, as a response to the horrors of the Blitz, of Hiroshima and the images of the concentration camps which had been shown in British cinema newsreels in April 1945,  the widespread fear of the atomic bomb and the anticipated Third World War; and yet these themes were very much in Dylan Thomas's mind - and everyone elses's - as he wrote the play.

While he worked in the daytime writing propaganda films for the BBC, Dylan had spent nights as a fire-watcher during the Blitz on London, and so had undoubtedly lived through this. He was also deeply affected by the destruction of the centre of Swansea, his home town, in a three-night blitz which killed 233 people in February 1941. His friend the communist grocer Bert Trick, an ARP warden, recorded meeting Dylan : " As I stood on the corner facing where the office had been the night before, there was nothing but a heaving mass of smouldering buildings. Oxford Street and the Market - all that had been flattened, and there were firemen's hoses snaking all over the mounds. And when I stood there, who should come round the corner but Dylan and Caitlin...he said "Bert, our Swansea has died. Our Swansea has died. " And by God, he was right. The Swansea we knew, the pubs , the places, were gone, and gone for all time."

One product of this was Return Journey, a semi-autobiographical radio play in which a shadowy narrator-figure returns to the devastated post-Blitz Swansea in search of  "Young Thomas". Although it aims to mix humour in with nostalgia, there's none of the chirpy "Britain can take it" attitude on display here, or the deep humour and melancholy late afternoon sun of UMW  - it's a dark, depressed thing, so gloomy it's a miracle it was ever broadcast.

 He wrote little poetry directly concerned with war, but that little included the mighty "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London". More about this in a later post, but this poem sees Dylan imagining Doomsday, wondering how that last moment might be, on the banks of the River Thames, and responding with a type of democratization of an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of elegaic praise-poetry, written for a child he never knew.

It points to a  developing interest in Dylan's poetry in the theme of innocence : the innocence of childhood, linked to the innocence of the countryside as an Edenic state of nature, often the Carmarthenshire countryside of his childhood holidays. Innocence as a positive value,  protection in the face of horror.

Although Fern Hill is perhaps the best-loved of these later poems, I think the twin themes of the countryside and childhood as a place of innocence, a refuge from the horrors of twentieth-century life, is best represented by the beautiful opening to "In Country Sleep", a tender late poem recalling the bedtime story-telling which was his "shared time" with his daughter Aeronwy :

"Never and never , my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
                              My dear, my dear,
out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep , good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise..."

And later :

" The country is holy : O bide in that country kind,
                                 Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace." 

O.K. : so what's all this got to do with Under Milk Wood, and producing/directing it ?  Well, the first half of UMW was originally sold to the BBC under the title "The Town That Was Mad.", along with notes outlining the intended development. This section ends with Willy Nilly the Postman wandering through Llareggub delivering the mail to the townsfolk; Dylan's plan outlines that he was intending a letter to be delivered to Captain Cat, as the senior member of the community : it was to be a communication from a government ministry ( the "Ministry of Sanity" , perhaps ), indicating that, owing to complaints received that all the inhabitants of Llareggub were completely mad, an Inspector was coming down to investigate. It might be necessary to quarantine the inhabitants of the village, to stop the madness spreading to the surrounding area.

Dylan's planned ending was to have a meeting at the town hall, in which the Sanity Inspector was to pronounce his findings. The villagers of Llareggub, initially outraged at the slur on their reputation, would have demanded that the Inspector offer a description of a perfectly sane town from the outside world, against which they could be judged. Halfway through the description of sanity as it stood in the 1940s, Captain Cat would have interrupted, and the villagers would have demanded unanimously to be declared insane and quarantined.

"The Town That Was Mad" was never completed, and the second half, written at speed in 1953, went in a very different direction. But I think knowing Dylan's original intention casts useful light on the early, pre-dawn dreams of the villagers. In Llareggub, every human being is precious, and it is their dreams that make them so. It also helps to find the the tone of the piece : there is satire at the expense of characters like Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, the Pughs or the Reverend Eli Jenkins, but it's never dark or biting, and  always a warm, understanding irony. All the characters are strange, and all slightly crazy : but they are all sympathetic, and however flawed are all fundamentally and deeply innocent.

Written too much, one last thing to share.

In November 1950, Dylan sent the poem "In the White Giant's Thigh" to the magazine Botteghe Oscure, together with a note about outlining a poem he was planning to write about the end of the world, to be called "In Country Heaven."  I've transposed his plan underneath, retaining his punctuation and paragraphing.

This synopsis was in my head for the 3 months we worked on UMW, and although I kept it away from the cast ( Apologies : if we'd started by reading this, you'd have thought I was even more crazy than in fact you did.), I think it's somewhere there in the very beginning and end of the play. ( I did, I think, once mention to Eva that I wanted Suo Gan to sound like "the love of God", which might not have been the most helpful direction.)

Enough babbling : over to Dylan.

"The plan of this long poem-to-be is grand and simple, though the grandeur will seem, to many, to be grandiose, and the simplicity crude and sentimental.

The godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker - He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called His country, one of His worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And when He weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the poem-to-be, He weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges, and, among themselves, in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedge-row rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten : and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow men who were once of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and his tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairs-breadth of the mind, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all you and I know and do not know. The poem-to-be is made of these tellings.

And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the earth.

It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies.

It is a poem about happiness."

The Tale and the Teller.

                         Through voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead.


 A key element in the development of Under Milk Wood was the time Dylan spent at the BBC in the war years, writing propaganda films, and the radio broadcast work that developed from this. As many commentators have noted, his poetry moved away from the intensely complex,  introverted and opaque qualities of the notebook poems of his Swansea years, towards a greater clarity and a greater sense of a direct audience ( without ever making him an entirely easy poet to read.)

It seems hard to deny the influence on Under Milk wood of  this type of broadcast work.

It's not Dylan's work, but he moved in these circles, and the movement from the general to the particular, from the collective to the individual, seems to me to be reminiscent of UMW. It would be interesting to film a section of the play - perhaps Willy Nilly delivering the post - in black-and-white, 50s Pathé newsreel style.

I think that's where the structure of UMW came from : but what worked well as a 1950s newsreel, or a radio play, simply won't work in a stage production. Characters in plays need reasons to be on the stage, interaction with other characters, motives for standing up and speaking : running the narrators of UMW as disembodied voices, or ( perhaps worse ) embodied but irrelevant voices, reminds me of a line from Harri Webb's poem Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel : "It is, of course, God, the well-known television personality." ( You can find the complete poem here. )

The 1971 film version opens with a promising solution, with Richard Burton playing the spirit of a dead man revisiting what we assume is his home village, accompanied by Ryan Davies, who may or may not be the Devil. It's a clever idea, faithful to Dylan's writing, grown out of the Drowned Sailors of UMW, and the two boys out  picking up girls  in Just Like Little Dogs ( Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog ). The opening sequence, sadly no longer on Youtube, as the two spirits wander through the empty, moonlit town in the wee small hours, is touched by melancholic genius. As the film progresses, however, it all gets a bit tiresome because of the lack of dramatic content - the two men have nothing to do in the town, no reason to take an interest in the townspeople and so no real interaction with them, and they finish up looking like a pair of bored teenagers hanging out in Llarregub because the shopping mall's not been built yet.

So what to do ? When Dylan's boyhood friend and literary executor Daniel Jones prepared the play for publication in 1954, he followed the version performed in New York the previous Autumn, where Dylan had split the narration into two separate voices to save the actors' voices : but there is no evidence Dylan intended to publish the text in this form, and some evidence at least that he thought of the narration as a single voice. If you're interested in the arguments here, it's worth checking the introduction to the Definitive Edition of Under Milk Wood, prepared by Walford Davies and Ralph Maude ( J.M. Dent, 1995 ).

I found the key in Dylan's own writing. Although Under Milk Wood has two formal narrators, in fact at different times different townsfolk take over the narration : most obviously Captain Cat, who has a whole section where he describes what he hears as the town awakes; but also Mog Edwards, in a long letter he writes to his lover Myfanwy Price; Mrs. Pugh, who describes everything she can see from her top-of-the-town window; and a guidebook, which bizarrely reads itself ( although we cut this : no alienation in our version of Llarregub ! ). Tantalisingly, the Reverend Eli Jenkins is writing his own description of the town, although in Dylan's text he never reads from it directly.

So, as we adapted it, we eliminated the characters of First and Second Voice altogether, and extended this   ( bad pun coming up ) playful approach, spreading the narrative around five principal characters. I can't claim this as original - I nicked the idea from a really well-documented University of Warwick production whose details I found here.

I think this was the single best decision we made in the course of the production. Once you spread the narration around, you open up your production to all the strange magic which is sitting there in the language of this astonishing text, just waiting for the creativity of your performers to release it. We quickly had things happening in our rehearsal space that I could never have planned, as we found layers of meaning in Dylan's words which can only be released when spoken dramatically, away from an authoritative disembodied narrator.

As I adapted, I had been particularly concerned to bring some female voices into the narration ( I was a bit worried about Dylan's women, often seen as either passive and distant objects of desire or objects of fear )
I thought I heard the voice of a young girl, just on the threshold of adulthood, in some of the more sensual, lazy, descriptive passages in the second half of the play, and suddenly Mae Rose Cottage, a relatively minor character in Dylan's play, had stepped up as a storyteller.

Intuition rather than plan, but as the storytelling passed between her and Captain Cat, between May and December, the old man living with his memories and the young girl with all her hopes and dreams, I found we had a play about endings, and beginnings, and everything in between.

                   ...peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave 
                   in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mr. Right
                   to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a 
                   brilliantined trout.