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.