Darkness and Dylan ( Part One.....)

“To begin at the beginning…it is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent, the hunched courters-and-rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat-bobbing sea.”

Even better, treat yourself to this : Michael Sheen, from the recent BBC Wales version.

( Warning : it does open with a bloke showing his arse. Not strictly part of Under Milk Wood, I think it’s to confuse the BBC’s search software ? )

I love the way this draws you in; he understands how intimate the opening  is. It takes us from outside the town, in through the darkened streets, into the individuality, the privacy of people’s homes, and on into their most private spaces, the secret hidden places inside them.  And somehow at the same time it’s moving out, quietly placing the dreams of the sleepers in the context of the natural world, the unknowable darkness of the sea , the parallel, secret lives of the animals, the natural rhythms of dewfall, the starfall out of which, in the beginning, we are all formed.

And the writing plays with the medium of radio to establish a private, intimate relationship with the listener as well : this is for you. And only for you. Although it’s full of magnificent, alliterative music, it’s never  a speech that needs to be declaimed.

Andrew Sinclair, who directed the 1972 film, described UMW as an “incantation”; and it is. Its origin in the golden age of radio dates it precisely, but makes it timeless and atavistic, for the ear rather than the eye, and so somehow reaching back to a time before theatre, before written language. It puts us a breath away from the Celtic bards, from blind Homer beside the wine-dark sea, closer to oral literature than anything from this century or the last. 

Under Milk Wood could be performed entirely in the dark; it’s a play for voices, and can function perfectly well using only the spoken word to conjure up its images. And yet paradoxically, when you adapt it for theatre, you have an edge over any radio production, in the sense you get to dramatize the darkness. You can bring an audience in and force the buggers to sit together in the dark, one of those strange little communities that only theatre can create,  sitting, together, listening.  

The opening monologue conjures the seaside town using darkness as a raw material : moonless, starless, bible-black, invisible, sloeblack, black, crowblack, within the first seven lines. And because we’re in the dark, we see the town that’s described perfectly. It works by the sheer power of the storytelling.  

I’ve always found the opening, with its central idea of calling a world into being through language, evocative of the creation myths of the Australian aborigines, where the ancestors travel across the land following the Songlines, singing as they go, calling physical features into existence through their song. That’s why I wanted to open the show by switching off the lights and singing in Welsh :  a lullaby for Dylan, the boy who never grew up, from the home he could never go back to, sung in the language of his ancestors, which ( perhaps ) he couldn’t speak.

After that, the initial draft of the play had each speaker in the opening section lighting a candle as they spoke, to have the stage gradually move from darkness to being lit by many different points of flickering, dancing candlelight, with the strange and atmospheric shadows these would have cast around the theatre.

The idea for this came from this book by the Bardsey poet Christine Evans, published by Gwasg Gomer :

, a long poem where I found the following quotation from the scientist Michael Faraday :

“In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle…”

And later, this time Christine’s words :

“ The Talmud from ancient Babylon

describes a world before this one

so full of growing, spreading light,

the vessel burst and all the fragments

scattered. What we are for

is gathering them up,

those brilliant, fleeting particles;

to try to hold them as they burn

to piece them back together,

hope they grow.”

Of course, we decided in the end it probably wasn’t a good idea to accidentally set fire to the occasional cast member, so the candle idea had to go. But the idea of the interplay of darkness and light did lead us directly to shadow theatre.

About which, more next time !

( Another link : I also love the way these guys, from South Carolina, open up Under Milk Wood,. If we could have done it in the round, this would have been the way to go! )