Madrid
Players’ production of Under Milk Wood is set in a pub. It seemed the obvious
choice, really.
Dylan liked
pubs – of course, he liked beer, as he wrote once : “ I liked the taste of
beer, its live white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through
the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow
swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.”
He liked
the music of pub names, in one of those lists of odds and ends he was so fond
of : “ the Mountain Sheep…the Blue Bull, the Dragon, the Star of Wales, the
Twll in the wall, the Sour Grapes, the Shepherd’s Arms, the Bells of Aberdovey… the Druid’s Tap : I
had nothing to do in the whole August world but remember the names.” ( The Outing).
He liked
the whole pub experience : the gossip, the games ( he was an expert
shove-halfpenny player ), the escape from everyday life. One biographer
suggests that he may have spent every night of his adult life in the pub, and I’ve
never seen anything to contradict this.
Pubs
allowed him to indulge the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of his conflicted
personality. In the pubs in West Wales, close to his Carmarthenshire roots, you
might find Dylan the poet, the gentle, quiet man, happy to spend hours in the
pub with just one or two pints, ready to buy drinks for his friends whenever he
had money, a good listener, occasionally scribbling down odd snatches of
conversation which caught his ear on the back of a cigarette packet and which
resurfaced later in poems or in Under Milk Wood. In London invariably you would
find Dylan the entertainer holding court in the centre of a bar for hours at a
time with surreal and often outrageous stories, lapping up the attention of
admirers and hangers-on, away on benders which lasted for days and occasionally
left him in hospital. Swansea seemed to bring out either, depending on the
company. In New York he was a
stage-Welshman, the Great Welsh Poet out of control in a foreign city which
drank whisky rather than beer and where the pubs didn’t send you home at 11.
There was a
Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect to his fondness for a drink as well. So many people who
knew him well in Wales testified that he wasn’t a heavy drinker, at least by
the standards of the 1930s and 1940s, that it must be true. Yet his every trip
to London seemed to turn into a drinking session lasting days, which combined
with chain-smoking and a reluctance to eat or sleep would bring him to the
verge of physical collapse – and then off back to Wales to recover. This is
also too well-documented not to be true.
There are a
million myths surrounding his death in New York in 1953, but there’s no doubt
that too much whisky and not enough food or sleep contributed to the
development of pneumonia, which laid him open to the medical error which killed
him. ( If you’re interested in this question, this is a good summary of the
recent work of David N. Thomas : http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/0/24748894
).
Was he an
alcoholic ? Maybe. He himself famously ( allegedly ) said that “an alcoholic is
someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”
Oddly
enough though, although he liked beer, it was company he seemed to seek in the
pub. After he left his family home in Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea at the age of
19, he never really had a stable home after that ( yes, the Boat House in
Laugharne http://www.dylanthomasboathouse.com/
is a smart piece of marketing; but Dylan spent half the 4 years he
“lived” there on the road, and in fact wrote very little there ). When interviewed
by Colin Edwards in the 1960s, Mervyn Levy, a boyhood friend from Swansea who
also knew Dylan as a young man in London, had this to say : “Dylan was happy in
any pub, providing he could find people to drink with, provided he could find
people who preferred drinking to eating, people who liked staying out rather
than going home. Because the most curious thing about Dylan was that he was
always adrift, he never really wanted to be settled, anywhere. He didn’t like
being at home, wherever home was, unless he was asleep. He had to be out in a
pub mixing with people, losing himself in people.”
So when it
came to adapting Under Milk Wood, the pub was an obvious setting : I knew we
had to dramatize the narration in some way, and so much of the play feels like
a string of tall tales you might hear over the bar… Dylan also had a poetic
obsession with time from an early age, and the notion of the pub as a place
where time ( temporarily, hee, hee ) stands still as you enter the dreamtime,
the mythic time of story, certainly appeals. It is always opening time in the Sailors' Arms.
Anyway, you
can over-intellectualize these things. I’ll finish blethering with a quote from
a relatively unknown essay by Paul Potts, published in “Dante Called You
Beatrice.” ( 1960 ) :
“In William
Dunbar’s great medieval poem Kynd Kittock there is the story of a young Scots
girl who, getting a bit fed up with heaven, asked Our Lady for permission to
start a wee pub just outside the gates, where people could have a last drink
before going home for ever. This is where I like to think of Dylan Thomas
passing his eternity, playing shove-halfpenny and sipping his pint, his eyes
hopefully on the door, as they were so often in life, waiting for his wife to
come in. He’ll tell many a funny story, poke fun at a friend, dismiss an enemy.
And perhaps he’ll write another great poem like his In My Craft or Sullen Art
or In Memory of Ann Jones. Yet even if he doesn’t those he did write, here on
earth, while his friends knew him, may quite factually last as long as this
language is alive.”
( A final
plug : the book Dylan Thomas : the Pubs by Jeff Towns ( Y Lolfa 2013 ) was also
an influence in my thinking about the play; it’s a significant contribution to
Dylan scholarship, but also a highly readable and beautifully-illustrated book, available from Amazon or here : http://www.ylolfa.com/ ).
