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 ! )