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 ?
( 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 !
