Islands of Their Contentment

I'm not normally in the habit of doing this, but I'm dedicating this blog to a couple of my actors from Under Milk Wood, Mike Tweedie and Ingrid Miller. Mike’s just got married to the lovely Anne McConnell, and Ingrid’s leaving Madrid to train to be a professional actor. So, while I babble on about two of the characters they created in UMW... good luck to you both, and thank you for the amazing job you did to bring these characters to life.

Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price ( played by Mike and Ingrid in our production ) are probably two of my favourite characters in the play. Mog is a small-town shopkeeper from the top end of Llareggub, a draper, an occupier of  small spaces,appropriately concerned with keeping up appearances, hemmed in by small-town religion and small-town lack of ambition. Myfanwy, the sweetshop-keeper from the bottom end of the town, is even less : you sense that going out into her garden to hang out the washing is as big an adventure as she can cope with. They are, of course, made for each other, and profess an intense, passionate, although in Mog’s case slightly inarticulate love for each other in letters they write each night; this is their only contact. Each perfectly fills the other’s need for a Mills and Boone, matinée-idol love affair without the financial and emotional risks – and the risk of disappointment -  involved in actually meeting the other person.

So far, this sounds pretty dark stuff; that synopsis reads like something out of Dubliners ( particularly “A Painful Case”), James Joyce’s collection of short stories about wasted lives blighted by small-town values and lack of ambition. I don’t dispute that Mog and Myfanwy can certainly be played that way, as “outcast from life’s feast”, in Joyce’s memorable phrase. But I don’t think that’s Dylan’s intention.

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about what makes theatre the wonderful, addictive thrill that keeps us coming back for more, and the key word is COLLABORATION. You bring something to the party, and if you're really lucky, find out that the weird, creative folks in the room with you can pick it up, play with it, reshape it and hand it back to you as something way cooler than you'd ever imagined possible, and by the time you've finished, you can't really remember where it all came from.  As director, I had imagined Myfanwy, the sweetshop-keeper, as the way she’s usually portrayed  : demure and understated.  Ingrid turned up at audition with, well, a different approach.

With Madrid Players, Ingrid has tended to play strong female characters ( and monkeys ) : The Queen of Hearts, Lady Macbeth, Trudy from Steel Magnolias, various incarnations of Death. Her take on Myfanwy’s first appearance, where she fantasizes about Mog as some Mills-and-Boone wildman rampaging down the hill to sweep her off her feet and drag her off to his emporium-on-the-hill for, well, a good ravishing, was not understated in the least. In 297 re-readings of the scene, I’d always read it as a negotiation, as Myfanwy and Mog conversing; of course, I'd misunderstood. Suddenly, Ingrid showed us a woman pouring into her fantasies all the passion and intensity she keeps at arm’s length in her “real” life. And of course, Mog speaks with Myfanwy’s voice, the words she wants to hear, because it’s her fantasy.

In rehearsal, Mike and Ingrid built on this. The energy and movement in the blocking flowed very naturally after the still, word-focused opening, and the matinée idol fantasy fell into place, to be reflected later in Susie Jones’ perfect retro styling of Ingrid’s hair. Here's what they finished up with :

Mike’s big monologue, where Mog composes his love letter to Myfanwy, presents certain difficulties these days. Dylan was poking good-natured fun at the avarice of small-town shopkeepers, and the restrictive influence of religion in small communities, but frankly if these were recognizable features of 1950’s life in Wales, they’re gone for good now ( at least in the North ), and as it is the speech needs as many notes and subtitles as Dickens to make sense. If it's to work as anything other than a heavy-handed period piece, you have to find something else which will open it up and connect with an audience.

When Mog writes his letter to Myfanwy…I don’t know if sexting has killed off the love letter, but I’m guessing a lot of people remember what it’s like to have a blank sheet in front of them and the burning need to put their feelings into words…you want to be vulnerable - it's a LOVE LETTER, for goodness sake -   but how vulnerable do you actually want to be ?  They don’t teach you how to do this in school, thankfully.

Is that too much of a cliché I’ve just written ? It sounds good, but is it actually true ? Will (s)he recognize where I pinched that bit from ? What if s(he) thinks it’s funny ? We found the key in Mog’s line “…then we will be together for ever and ever !”, with its echo of an 8-year-old’s storytelling. What if Mog is not a gifted writer ? Every single night he gets to sit down with his homework, his nightly love letter to Myfanwy. What if he’s like Christian, Roxane’s gorgeous but inarticulate suitor from Cyrano de Bergerac, only in his case there’s no Cyrano to help him with the words ? 

As with almost all of UMW, this is a genius writing at the height of his powers; Dylan is aware of the power of language to spin out beautiful half-truths in the service of a deception; ironically, because Mog is an incompetent writer, his letter is true.

I’ve touched before on how UMW is a play about happiness, with all its strange couples all strangely happy in the strangeness of their relationships, washed by Dylan’s sadness at the shipwreck of his own marriage. That’s how I read Mog and Myfanwy’s last appearance :

 

“FIRST VOICE

Mr. Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from one another at the top and the sea end of the town write their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm White Book of Llareggub you will find the little maps of the islands of their contentment.”

There’s an odd little Zen vibe running through this. We all live in a culture which tends to focus on achievement. The stories we often tell each other, the stories we often tell ourselves,  suggest that our happiness, our fulfilment, is to be found in a happy ending : get married and live happily ever after, save the world from the killer robots and everything’s all right again. But life doesn’t actually give us endings, or at least rarely happy ones. At the end of UMW, it’s clear that Mog and Myfanwy’s dreams won’t come true – because maybe that’s not what dreams are actually for. Their relationship gives them a space to be happy in; they travel hopefully, because they know they will never arrive.

They remind me of a couple in another much-loved book. In Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Florentino Ariza has loved  Fermina Daza, and courted her unsuccessfully, for 53 years, 7 months, and 11 days ( with their nights ). The vagaries of life, and 498 pages of novel, conspire to keep them apart, until finally they’re united, in old age, on an old steamboat travelling backwards and forwards up the river, banned from docking in port by the protocols to control a cholera epidemic. This is how the novel “ends” :

“El capitán miró a Fermina Daza y vio en sus pestañas los primeros destellos de una escarcha invernal. Luego miró a Florentino Ariza, su dominio invencible, su amor impávido, y lo asustó la sospecha tardía de que es la vida, más que la muerte, la que no tiene límites.

-¿ Y hasta cuándo cree usted que podemos seguir en este ir y venir del carajo? – le preguntó.

Florentino Ariza tenía la respuesta preparada desde hacía cincuenta y tres años, siete meses y once días con sus noches.

-          Toda la vida – dijo.

And in my slightly wobbly translation ( I don't believe it's possible to translate "carajo" accurately : )  )

The captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of a winter frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible strength, his undaunted love, and found himself shocked by the slowly-dawning suspicion that it is life, rather than death, that has no limits.

“And how long do you think we can carry on with this frigging coming and going ?” he asked.

Florentino Ariza had had his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days with their nights.

“ Forever,” he said.

I've babbled on too much already, but this improbable Wales-Colombia connection also finds a harbour in Rota, near Cádiz, now home to Anna Rámirez, who helped with the most amazing props for UMW, including a whole series of beautifully addressed envelopes for the letters which Willy Nilly delivers to different characters.

I kept a number as souvenirs, and in front of me as I write, I have Mog's letter to Myfanwy :

 Now, as I hold the envelope up to the light, I can see that there's actually and handwritten letter inside it; and it appears to carry either a watermark, or a stamp, saying SHOP at MOG EDWARDS.

Obviously, it's pretty unforgiveable to steam open someone else's mail. But the fact that I was seriously thinking about grabbing the kettle - and not, like, ripping the thing open, in case Mog finds out what I've done - shows just how far this craziness can go. I mean, it's all right to open the letter of a fictional character, isn't it ?

And I know that inside, I'll find the letter Dylan wrote, that Mike learned and remodelled and made his own and shared with the audience over four days in March last year. It'll be lovingly copied out in Anna's handwriting. I'm sure that's all that's in there.

But what if I find another, different, new love letter from Mog Edwards to Myfanwy Price ?

"Ydych chi wedi colli rhywbeth - dan yr eira....have you lost anything - under the snow ? "

(  CIVIC NOTE : If you want to spare yourself my ramblings, and just see how Madrid Players staged Captain Cat and the Drowned Sailors in our 2014 production of Under Milk Wood, scroll straight down to the bottom of the page. Go on, I won't tell anyone. )

 When I started off writing about Under Milk Wood, I had no idea how hard it would be to write about. Theatre, the business of directing a play is essentially a collaborative process. You take all your disparate ideas and influences from your writer, whatever notions of theatrical language and technique you may have picked up from your own teachers along the way, in this case, loose floating bits of legend and folk-tale, whatever music takes you to the heart of your story, and your own experience of life and all the weird little stuff you notice around you every day.  You've got all this stuff rattling round inside your head, and when you open your mouth in your rehearsal space with your script in your hand for the first time, you just have to hope that something minimally coherent falls out. Then if you get really lucky and work with the wildly creative actors and crew that I did, they make Dylan's words, your words,  their own, changing them and improving them in the process, but also being changed in some way by them. So you wind up collaborating with a long-dead writer and a millennial cultural tradition, and the very lively bunch of creative folks in front of you.  When it works, it's a thing of beauty, but trying to write it down on paper or screen as a ( literally ) linear process is like trying to translate Japanese into algebra.

Today, you'll be pleased to hear we've got as far as... page 3 of the script ! Captain Cat and the long-drowned snuggling up to him !

Captain Cat is introduced as "the retired blind seacaptain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of schooner house..." This introduction shows Dylan's full linguistic range at work. The "seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape" makes us hear the sea lapping gently at the door of Captain Cat's house, gives us the water moving beneath our feet as a ship rolls out on the ocean, but at the same time conjures up a liminal figure who belongs not fully to the sea or the land; and from that very first "ship-in-bottled", and the echo of Macbeth's "cabin'd, cribbed, confined", we sense he's trapped, stuck within the four walls of his house, the limitations of his aging body, as surely as a ship in a bottle. And yet he's a man with a rich past : the Cat in his name marks him as a wanderer,  brings to mind the cat o'nine tails, the harshness of a sailor's life, but also his past as a tom-cat, a life "sardined with women."

He has an otherworldly quality. He's a narrator, both living inside the town and sitting outside it telling its story. He's a gatekeeper, the first solid figure introduced as that marvellous opening monologue fades out, leading us in turn into the rest of the village.  I kept coming back to his liminal quality, a man who belongs equally to different worlds : the sea and the land, here-and-now and memory, the living and the dead with whom he seems more comfortable. And of course he's a character in a play which he partly narrates, even in Dylan's unadapted script. This role as blind storyteller gives him an epic quality, a sort of Welsh Homer; and his position as captain of a dead crew, who won't stop talking to him, also conjures up the Ancient Mariner.

( This statue of Captain Cat now stands in Swansea's former Maritime Quarter; fiction overtaking reality.)

All this Liminal Fliminal stuff is fine, but of course, in theatre you have to ground your characters in some sort of reality. So who really is Captain Cat ?

Not many of us these days have met too many sailors ( certainly not in Madrid ! ), but Dylan Thomas just caught the end of the age of Welsh shipping. Swansea, where he grew up, was the second most important port of the British Empire : at the beginning of the 1930s, when as a respectable middle-class kid with an eye for the down-at-heel drinking in the Maritime Quarter, he would have witnessed the decline. On a map of 1880 this area had 14 different pubs, with names to fire the imagination - The Lord Nelson, the Cuba, the Heart's Delight - and presumably as many brothels. He describes the area in his short story "Just Like Little Dogs" as a place where "methelated-spirit drinkers danced into policemen's arms and women like lumps of clothes in a pool waited, in doorways and holes in the soaking wall, for vampires and firemen", an enticing mixture of the exotic and the downright seedy. There's no doubt he would have met a fair number of old men ready to share tales of adventure, from the days when their eyes were blue and bright, when Welsh schooners ran from Swansea Bay to Buenos Aires, round the Horn and up the Pacific coast as far as San Francisco.

                ( Jim Trainor as Captain Cat in Madrid Players' production of Under Milk Wood.)

A world so long gone it's hard to even imagine : maybe the guys who work on oil rigs out at sea, or join the army to get out of some godforsaken one-horse town are the only modern equivalent. Jim Trainor, who played Captain Cat so wonderfully in our production, mentioned he had spoken to Vic, a Madrid Player and a genuine sea-captain; and Vic advised that the basic responsibility of any captain, when everything else goes to shit, is to bring everyone back alive; and that's exactly what Captain Cat failed to do. I think Jim used that as his line through to the sailors who haunt the Captain's dreams.

 In rehearsal with Jim Trainor and Susie Jones ( Rosie Probert ), we also realised that he doesn't actually talk to anyone in the course of the play. He sits at his window, smells the sea, listens and recites the life of the town, recording it as surely as the Reverend Eli, and remembers.

Dylan had an ongoing contact with the port of New Quay, in Ceredigion,where he regularly visited an aunt and cousin in the 1930s, and where he lived in a bungalow ( "Majoda" ) 1944-45.At the time, there were over 35 retired sea-captains from the ocean ships living in the town, and according to David N. Thomas in his article "The Birth of Under Milk Wood", collected in "Dylan Remembered" Volume 2 ( Seren Books, 2004 ), one in 5 of the adult males in the town were master mariners. According to David N., this early section of Under Milk Wood is full of detail from New Quay :  like Llareggub, it's a town which runs steeply down a hill towards the harbour, with a "top and sea-end". Jack Patrick Evans of the Black Lion pub made buttermilk and bred whippets, just like one of the drowned, Dai Fred Davies worked the donkey engine on a local boat and metamorphosed into "Tom-Fred the donkey-man", and Dylan bought his milk at Maes Gwyn farm.

Incidentally, the answer to the question "Who milks the cows at Maesgwyn ?" is "Nobody." By the time UMW premiered in New York, the farm's fields had been swallowed by the sea.

                                                      ( Mary Reid  as Dancing Williams )

So, somewhat unexpectedly, a section of the play which seems like wild fantasy turns out to be full of small precise details taken from the lives of people Dylan knew. And so it's all about memory. Captain Cat remembers the long drowned; who in turn remember the people and places they loved in life.

Now placing Captain Cat as the guardian of memory was, consciously or not, Dylan's masterstroke. The Welsh coastline is itself one long metaphor for memory and forgetfulness, the way that time and tide take everything away eventually. .Along the sweep of Cardigan Bay, the shoreline is constantly shifting, burying washing away sections of beach or burying others under newly established sand dunes : I remember a week spent as a volunteer near Llanystumdwy on Lleyn in 1992, working to build netting over dunes, wooden walkways down to the beach, to try to stem the power of the tide washing the beach across the bay to Harlech - where the church at Llandanwg  regularly has to be dug out from the sand building up around its walls. The opposite effect is represented by the storms of winter 2013-14 , when for a few days  a forest dating back 5000 years briefly emerged from the water near Borth.

Welsh legends are full of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the lost lands of the Welsh Atlantis, which allegedly went under the sea one night when drunken watchmen left the dyke gates open. And of people turned into sea-creatures, seagulls and seals, or of seals become men and women, longing for the sea and the life they can't return to.

 Memory as the struggle to hold back the tide,  to preserve all the things we lose, everything which will eventually be lost. Read like this, when Captain Cat remembers his drowned shipmates, it's not a nightmare, but an act of remembrance, a conscious effort to keep their memory alive : which is the power behind the final exchange, at the end of the play :

Captain Cat : Dancing Williams ?

D.W. : Still dancing.

Captain Cat : Jonah Jarvis ?

J.J. : Still.

Rosie Probert : Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.

 

( Susie Jones as Rosie Probert )

 So in our version of the play, Dancing Williams' line "Remember me, Captain ? " sounds the opening note of a symphony on the theme of memory and remembrance, which reaches its highest point with Rosie Probert, who in the Captain's memory voices the terrible lines : " Remember me....I have forgotten you... I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever...I have forgotten that I was ever born."

And with this perspective,once you look closely, the interweaving of memory, of commemoration and remembrance, the efforts the characters keep the fragile structure of their lives from washing into the sea, run everywhere through the play. The young fantasise about the lives they will have in the future; the old remember.

There are at least four graves : "Hannah Rees, beloved wife", where the owl swoops in Bethesda graveyard; the grave of Gomer Owen, which Bessie Bighead tends so lovingly; and " Llareggub Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples who dwelt in the region of Llarregub before the Celts had left the Land of Summer"; and the tombstone Cherry Owen falls asleep on.But the town is full of all sorts of less formal memorials : the Reverend Eli records the White Book of Llareggub,  remembering his father of whom there is no known likeness; Polly Garter sings about poor dead Willie Wee as she hangs out the washing; in the houses of the sleepers, we find "the yellowing, dickybird-watching pictures of the dead"; and as dusk falls on the town, the lamps in the windows call back the dead, who have run away to sea. Even Mary Ann Sailors recording her age each day from her window, Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard listing her dead husbands' daily tasks, and Captain Cat's careful listing of each of the town children on their way to school could be an effort to hold onto something fleeting and transient, although we didn't specifically go in that direction.

The Welsh traditional music we used in the show was a chosen to reflect this, in itself a commemoration of generations of nameless musicians, disappeared in time and invisible to history, who forged this musical culture.

We also took inspiration from Delyth Jenkins, who graciously allowed us to use our harp music. She describes in the liner notes to her CD Aros ( Welsh for "stay" ) how when her daughters were children, they used to pick wild flowers from the hedges and place them on Bedd y Morwyr ( The Sailor's Grave ) the grave of an unknown sailor washed up on the beach and buried in the churchyard of one of the villages near Swansea. 

Memory, and remembrance.Messing about with MovieMaker one evening I tried combining some footage of a village drowned beneath a reservoir ( it was posted with the claim that it's Tryweryn, but it's not ) with the soundtrack to the 1987 Anthony Hopkins version :

The night we put this together in the Madrid Players Clubhouse was one of the most magical theatrical experiences I've, well, experienced. We gave each of the sailors a backstory, and a specific relationship with Captain Cat; then we went into the shadow theatre, backlighting Polly Garter's sheet from the washing line, since we felt the floating, slightly insubstantial nature of shadow work would give an appropriately dreamlike atmosphere, and reflect the undersea location of the long drowned ( it also let me cast a string of talented women as turn of the century Welsh sailors ). But really, I just let loose Mary Reid, Suzie Gilmour, Brianna Garcia, Harvey Holtom, Parisa Aryan and Suzie Jones to build the sequence up after raiding the cellar for props. Couldn't tell you who came up with what, but we worked hard to keep it grounded, as far as you can ground the ghosts of drowned sailors in their former Captain's nightmares. Alba Sola added the magic of her fiddle to proceedings later.

 So ( AT LAST ! ) here's what we made of it...

                                          ( Filmed by J. Daniel Montemayor. Thanks, Dani ! )

My Dad had been a sailor in his youth, with the British navy in the Mediterranean, and sometimes talked about Malta and Cephallonia in the 1950s.  As my parents grew older, I watched their horizons shrink, until eventually the village and its life pretty much became the limits of their world. My Mum had always been a bit Mary Ann Sailors with a harder edge and no religion, essentially content with her life, her craftwork, her place in the world. I think Dad always missed the sea, though - he often talked about getting a boat, although it never came to anything. He still had so many things he wanted to do. In his last summer,before we took him down to the nursing home where he died, he talked about getting his health back, and how he'd like to go on a cruise. The characterisation of Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood was all Jim Trainor, but there was one move, which maybe Jim remembers but I doubt anyone else would spot, which I directed for a reason : a single small memorial.

Coming next :  two of my favourite UMW characters : Myfanwy Price ! Mr. Mog Edwards !