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 ?