To begin...

"I remember when I talked to him, he spoke of the incredible joy of life. But then at some other point in the conversation he was talking about the darkness, and he wasn't feeling too well that day. But the joy seemed very real, and the darkness seemed very real, and neither of them seemed to exist without the other." Robert Lowell describing Dylan Thomas, 1953.

As some of you may know, the theatre group I work with, the Madrid Players, performed Under Milk Wood last March, sadly and musically and humorously. Turned out to be the theatrical experience of my life. Since we're now pretty much at the end of the process - just some photos and DVDs to be passed out - I thought I'd take some time to put down my "director's notes" - perhaps for people who enjoyed our show, perhaps useful for other people thinking of staging it.

Now I know plenty of folks who think that UMW is a play to be enjoyed, not to be analysed, and it’s an opinion I respect. One of the joys of directing it is that there are sections so clear, so simple and so brilliantly written that you can just throw them at the actors and leave them to get on with it. ( I call this my “method.” )

But.. you still find people who feel UMW isn't quite a "proper" play, and that Dylan belongs in some sort of strange corner for Welsh idiot savants, as if what he wrote was fine but he didn't quite understand it himself, and because it moves people and makes them laugh but isn't exactly political or philosophical, it's not worth serious attention. So I hope nobody minds as I go through some of the reading that helped shape our production.

Now, Under Milk Wood is an odd, unbalanced, episodic kind of thing, but it has that capacity of the truly great plays to offer an infinite number of readings. One perfectly adequate approach is to do it with a light touch, emphasising the innuendo and seaside humour, offering a kind of Welsh Disney or a Carry On film with poetry. Andrew Sinclair's 1971 film has elements of this approach. I didn't want to go down this road.

With such a well-known play, however, I did want to try to find a way in an audience might not have seen before. I did a lot of surfing the web to rattle a few ideas round : this review of a 2011 production provided a breakthrough. The idea that you could use the text of UMW to tell another story running behind and around the words in the play opened it up for me.

Now, Dylan introduced the first New York performance in the Poetry Centre on May 3rd., 1953 : " A picture of a small Welsh town-that-never-was."; and the long essay by David N. Thomas, "The Birth of Milk Wood" confirmed that, in spite of the legend, Under Milk Wood was written mostly outside Wales.

In this paper, Thomas makes clear that, contrary to popular legend, very little of UMW was written in laugharne, or even in Wales : in summary, it was started formally in 1944 in New Quay, Ceredigion, which provided the geography of Llarregub, Maesgwyn farm, the graveyard full of drowned sailors... picked up again in 1947 at South Leigh, in Oxfordshire, where Dylan completed most of the first half. It might have remained a fragment had not his promoter, John Malcolm Brinnin, sold all the tickets for a performance in New York in May 1953, forcing Dylan to write some 60 % of the play - part of the first half, and the entire second half - between New York and Boston in April 1953.In his last summer, he added two poem/songs : the Reverend Eli's sunset poem, and Come and Sweep My Chimbley, either in Hammersmith, or in Laugharne. then he set off on his last trip to New York.

The timing is important here : in early 1953 Dylan was mourning his father, who had died the previous autumn; he was a sick man himself; and his marriage had all but disintegrated ( I've wondered how far this accounts for the number of husband/wife relationships in the play, almost as if he's running over all of the ways these very strange couples can find happiness - might be stretching the point, though ). All of this accounts for the strange, bittersweet, atmosphere in the second half of the play, and the moments of genuine darkness.

By now, we had our path. We would present a play about the beauty and joy of life, told from the point of view of a not-quite-disillusioned and dying man who knows the value of everything he's losing. Told against the backdrop of an ephemeral Spring day in Wales, remembered by a great poet in the depths of despair in a bar in New York.

When I was 16 years old, in my first summer job, selling ice cream from a kiosk on Rhyl prom, I remember a Scots guy who used to come by on sunny afternoons to cadge a free cornet. He looked about 50, although I guess he was in his 30s, clearly a serious drinker, ill. To be honest, he kind of scared me a bit, and I gave him ice cream so he'd move on quickly, as much as to be kind. The next summer I worked on the prom again, and Ididn't see him. Sunshine, the sea, sweetness, what I saw in the eyes of that lost man - all kind of Under Milk Wood, and I hope all somewhere in the adaptation.

Sunny afternoon by the sea in Wales. This is Llandudno prom.

Going Down the Pub

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/ ).

Second Dark Time

Well, it's hardly news right now that Madrid Players have entrusted their Spring Classic ( please note : capital S , capital C ) to me, on the basis that I pitched them an unstageable play with far too many characters, no plot and which was never actually finished. Yes, it's this, flying the flag with this poster from el Maestro de Atocha, Aki Ginory  :

Aki does almost all of Madrid Players' posters. The man is a genius, but this time he's excelled himself : I don't think I've ever seen a better poster for UMW.

Over the next six weeks and a day ( yes, I've counted ), I'll try to blog occasionally about the show, and the background, although we'll see if my stamina lasts...

The thinking behind the project ( as far as there was any ) is two-fold. Dylan as  a poet felt that language had gone stale, and that it was almost impossible to say anything new; the poet's job, according to this view, is to make language new by placing familiar words in very unfamiliar contexts, making them explode with new possibilities and new meanings. A trivial example : he writes about the town "head over bells in love." Our job in the show has been to reinvent Under Milk Wood, to remain faithful to Dylan's words and spirit, but present the text in new contexts which breathe life back into it : so it'll still work for people coming to it for the first time, but also ring out new for someone who's heard it a hundred times.

And the other idea ? Since the play gives us many different voices joining together to tell the story of the town, I wanted as many different creative voices in the production as possible. Although it's very technical, it's a real actors' show, which would work as a free-standing piece of street theatre. On top of that, we've brought in a soundscape made up of fragments of traditional Welsh music, performed on harp and fiddle and by the remarkable Côr Chwaraer Madrid, who have learned tipyn bach o Gymraeg ( a little Welsh ) to take part. And I promised myself to say nothing to outsiders about staging, except that if ( fingers crossed ) we carry it off, it'll just be one WOW moment after another ( and possibly the occasional WtF moment as well - one would not wish to become too predictable, after all. )

Enough babble for one evening. This sounds absurdly confident, but then again, I've been in rehearsals and seen what my cast are capable of.

"Dylan affirmed. He said how easy it would be to write poems of defeat and despair, but what he wanted to do was to write poems of joy, and that's of course, what he set out to do in the last poems. And because it's more difficult, it's really more true."

Second Dark Time ? I directed UMW as a social activity-cum-reading in 1996.

Breath, Love and Masking tape.

A bit of a prosaic title, that one, for an organisation which could be called many things; but prosaic is not one of them.

The Madrid Players is Madrid's main  English-language theatre group. I've been involved ( a word which conceals all sorts of misdemeanours ) for a few years in the mid-1990s, and continually now since 2010.  Although the city is home to umpteen semi-professional or even professional outfits, each of them is a slave to the need to earn money from theatre, their performers indeed professionals, but condemned to an eternal treadmill of Alice in Wonderland in pigeon-English for semicoherent 7-year-olds, dusting off A Christmas Carol for a yuletide spin every 12 months. Marley's torment seems a picnic in comparison.

Ahem. Sorry about that - got a bit carried away, there. The truth, though, is that if you want to do real theatre in English,Madrid Players is the only game in town. Our strength is that we're an amateur group, a democratically-constituted organisation run by elected volunteers. This means that in a difficult year, we might stop squabbling amongst ourselves long enough to put up a few shows; but on the up-side, it means that whatever your dream show is, you've got a chance to do it. Irish drama so obscure not even its author is convinced he's heard of it ? No problem ! An intense narration of the life of Catherine of Aragon ? Sure to put bums on seats, go for it ! Robert Burns on ice ? Write up your proposal and present it to the committee.

O.K., I'm being flippant. We haven't done the Burns show yet, although I have high hopes. The Constant Quene put so many bums on seats people had to be turned away.. And the Players do many more mainstream shows ( I've been involved in the Crucible, Steel Magnolias, Oliver, Our Town, a good number of pantomimes now ). Not many groups in Madrid can put up a pantomime which attracts audiences of 3000 people every year. And we do have a particular tradition of evenings of musical theatre. But the group does offer a creative space the like of which I haven't experienced since I was at uni, when we used to put up and go and see the kind of shows no-one in their right mind would produce, perform in or go and see, without costumes, props or occasionally actors.

It's also an example of that aphorism - I think it's Kipling who wrote this - that there are two kinds of   people : those who stay at home, and those who don't. MPs is a pretty cool meeting-place for the second kind, and it's enriching to find yourself singing, doing ludicrous voice warm-ups, painting scenery, with assorted Irish, Americans, Scots, Australians, Canadians, and of course, a strong number of good Spanish folks ( it was a Spanish philosopher whose name escapes me who wrote that la patria de cada uno son las idiomas que habla - your native country is the languages you speak. Particularly if you speak them while dressed up as el Pulpo Paul, trying to recreate the Stade de France on World Cup night with only 6 performers and no sound effects.  ). In fact, probably more than enriching, there are moments when it feels like you've joined a slightly odd extended family : odd, because for the time of the rehearsal process, and particularly the 2- or 3-day run of a show, you work very closely with this disparate group of strangers, depend completely on each other for the pantomime or song or sketch or whatever to hang together - but of course, we know virtually nothing about each other's lives outside that strange and slightly magical theatre space.

But this, of course, is theatre. It depends entirely on everyone, performers and audience, believing intensely, for a short period , in something that isn't there at all, and by this shared delusion somehow willing it into being.That's why perhaps my favourite theatre photo is this one, pinched from Eva, which must have been taken maybe ten minutes after Steel Magnolias ended.

It sums it all up, really : whatever story you've just been telling - Ebeneezer Scrooge, Catherine of Aragon, the redemptive power of friendship in a hairdressing salon - there's nothing really there. It's all just breath, love, and masking tape.

 Shakespeare loved the precarious, wobbly-flat nature of theatre, I think. He refers to it in any number of plays, but never more beautifully than in The Tempest Act 4 Scene 1, when Prospero renounces his magic :

                           " Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
                              As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
                             Are melted into air, into thin air :
                             And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
                            The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
                            The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
                            Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
                            And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
                            Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
                            As dreams are made on; and our little life
                            Is rounded with a sleep."

I could blether on a whole lot more. Every show feels a bit like a personal Everest ( some more than others... ), and that's a second thing that I think connects virtually all members : apart from all being slightly nuts in a variety of interesting ways, we're all ants-in-your-pants types, uncomfortable sitting around when there's another corner to be turned, another mountain to be climbed, another ( God help us ) SHOW TO PUT ON.

                                       
                                          ( The view from the top. Audience not pictured. )

And finally, there's the sheer joy of creativity. We've just come off The Constant Quene, a play about the life of Catherine of Aragon, England's Spanish Queen. I signed up for singing in the choir, because that seemed like an easy option. Like, who knew ? We had a great time in the rehearsal process, all of us went some way beyond what we thought we were capable of in all directions, we seem to have picked up at least two more gigs on the way ( Spanish Renaissance music is apparently the new rock n´roll ), and there's talk about sticking together as a unit after Christmas ( I hope singing as well ). On a personal level, the combination of this and my school inspection seems to have set me off in all directions ( you might have noticed ). In particular, the combination of all those lovely Scottish names rolling off the Black Wall, and the wonderful performance of The Flowers of the Forest has reconnected me with... but that's a story for another time.

I'll shut up now.

Oh, here's a link to the website. You'll be able to read something that actually makes sense there.

www.madridplayers.org

The sundial

Not much to this post : when I went back to Wales in July, I found the sundial in the churchyard in St. George.

My Dad was secretary of the Parish Council for a number of years after he retired, pretty much until his last illness, and the good people of the village wanted to commemorate him. It's the perfect place, as he passed by there almost every day on his lunchtime walk to the pub.

The base is granite from the local quarry, and slate. Strangely enough, the materials Ailsa and I had originally thought of for the gravestone ( actually Mike, my brother-in-law's, idea ) : Welsh slate and Scots granite.

My Dad was a very private character, and like a lot of men with their fathers, my relationship with him was complicated to say the least : too different, and too similar. But on the second anniversary of his passing, I'm left with the words on the sundial : In memory of Michael de Salis, 2011; to the glory of God.  And the lines of Dylan Thomas : forever may he live lightly, at last, on that last, crossed hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love.

Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidence ?  I remember back in the day, when I was doing a bit of Anthropology at Uni, noticing that the difference between cultures where belief in magic is still prevalent and our own, is that in these "older", "earlier" cultures, for want of better words, everything has a cause. Your goat just died ? Someone bewitched it. Maybe it died of a well-known disease - but why did the disease infect my goat, and not my next-door neighbour's ? Because he's a witch ( although he thinks I offended the gods, or whatever.) That raven sitting on a signpost in front of you ?  Obviously a sacred bird telling you something, if only you could learn the secret language of ravens.

                                       
                                                 Answers on a postcard, please.

Now, I'm a sophisticated twenty-first century man-about-town, so when my goat dies, I just put it down to my bad luck.  And I know birds don't really fly around communicating with me, they're just doing their own birdy kind of stuff, and if they happen to do it on my head, well, it's just a coincidence. It's probably a good thing to take this point of view, on the whole : I've found that accusing your neighbours of witchcraft, and telling everyone that magpies are talking to you in their beautiful avine language, gets you off on the wrong foot with your Comunidad de Vecinos. 

"Bad luck" and "coincidence" aren't proper explanations, though : they're fall-back explanations, shorter than saying twenty times a day  "Hey, I don't have a clue what this is all about." . They don't explain anything. A coincidence is a combination of two elements, events, whatever, which look like they're connected, but they're not. Except they are : they're connected by the fact that we notice them, and, since human beings are story-telling animals, we start to weave a pattern out of them.

 Just recently, I came across the mother of all coincidences.

After the Summer from Hell 2 years ago, my sister and I spent a lot of 2012 going back to the house in Wales and clearing stuff out. One day I might develop the expressive resources to explain how strange, painful, and occasionally funny the business of packing our parents' lives into boxes and throwing most of it away was. But like a lot of stuff at the business end of death, it was a job which had to be done , and we did it, a week together at Easter, otherwise taking turns.

                                               A tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff.

By September we'd got everything cleared out. Ailsa handled the last part of it, and I'm quite glad I never saw the house empty; so much of ourselves, of what we are, is actually there in the space we occupy, in our STUFF ( for want of a better word ) that I think it would have upset me to see thirty years of our life as a family reduced to memory, as if they had never happened.

Anyway, the house in Church Street went on the market, attracted bidders, we accepted an offer, endless farting-around with estate agents, lawyers ( whose activities make the secret language of ravens look reasonably intelligible ). and in April the contracts were exchanged.

We were cheered up considerably to find that the "unknown bidder" who'd been in the shadows while all the legal folks talked to each other, turned out to be Eleri, the daughter of Jane Edwards, our next-door neighbour. Ailsa and I had wanted to sell because we're too far away to really use the house, and it's a house that deserves to be lived in, so to sell to somebody local, who we knew, looking to start  a family close to her own family, was exactly what we would have wanted. Eleri had known my family since she was a child, had been to the funerals, and her Mum had been very kind to us, especially during my Dad's last illness and in keeping an eye on the house in the 18 months it had lain empty. So this was perfect, really.

Now for the strange part : when we cleared the house, the estate agent suggested leaving some carpets in place. Apparently it makes it easier for people viewing to imagine a comfortable, homely place, than just bare floorboards. So it was left to Eleri and her husband to clear the last of the carpets out and take them to the skip, and so they found the photograph.

Now, my Dad was a keen photographer, always taking an array of battered 1950s and 1960s cameras with him on walks, always on the look-out for a photo. This meant that when we cleared, Ailsa and I threw out thousands of photos : we kept a lot, but there's only so much you can keep. But one particular photo must have fallen out of somewhere more than 20 years ago, slipped down under the carpet in the spare room, unnoticed and forgotten. Which is where Eleri found it when she lifted the carpet.

It was a photograph of her, aged about 3 years old, taken round about 1986.

I don't really believe in coincidence, or in magic ( although if my Dad planned that one, it beats most card tricks I've seen ). Perhaps it's no more a message than the raven. But it is strange to think of that photograph, lying there forgotten more than 20 years in the dark as our family life moved noisily over and around it, the last 18 months in the empty house that didn't really belong to anyone, waiting for the moment to be found. And as a story-telling animal, I'm entitled to say that it feels like the old house welcoming the new family, telling them it's a good place to be and it's good for them to be in it.

King Eystein and Mr. Mourinho

Well, I wrote this really long blog entry thingy, but reading it back it just looked bloated and flatulent and self-important. So I've done you the favor of deleting it :  here's the edited highlights. I guess this makes it kind of interactive : if you don't think it's a brilliant analysis of a complex topic,, it's because you've misunderstood my genius.

1.  Press conferences after the Spanish Cup Final.

2.  Ego, the Living Planet ( with picture ).

3.  School management.

4.  Jesse's Song from Ugly Betty. See it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiRBoewcU4k

5.  Two football quotations.

6. And where I wanted to finish up : King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh.

I've known and loved this poem for more than 25 years. Sheenagh took the incidents described from one of the Old Norse sagas . I love the way she uses the punctuation to say so much, and the placing of the word "kinsman" in the last line.When I first read the poem in 1985, I thought " Boo to King Sigurd ! " As you grow older, of course, and re-read the poem, the penny drops that we've all got a bit of Sigurd and a bit of Eystein somewhere in there.Oddly enough, for a poem written in the early 1980s, it strikes a chord with the whole Facebook phenomenon.

King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh

( From an incident in Heimskringla Saga : Snorri Sturlusson ).

"When I went to fight in Saracen country,
seven times I had the victory,
and where were you, kinsman Eystein, then ? "

Northwards in Vaage, building the fishermen
smoke-houses; they have work all seasons now.

"In Apulia I did not see you
on my crusade; where were you at that time ?"

Setting up inns on the road out of Trondheim
where night frosts used to freeze the traveller.

"I saw Christ's tomb; I did not see you there."

At Agdaness the ship-grave, I had made
a harbour, to save men's lives when I am dead,
and but for my life, it would be worse for them.

"What were you doing, brother, when I swam
the Jordan river, or when I tied a knot
by the bank, and promised my kinsman should come out
on that holy journey, and untie it again ?"

I was bringing under our rule the Jemte men,
not with war, but with good words. And a man unties
the knot he finds, kinsman, where he is.


I just love that poem : also ( English Lit. hat on, kind of Shakespearean thing with a feather in the top ) full of clever, subtle music. Look at how the brothers' words echo each other through rhymes and half-rhymes. 

King Sigurd and King Eystein is taken from Selected Poems by Sheenagh Pugh, quoted here with permission. This, like all her poetry as far as I know, is published by Seren Books.  Her website is worth looking at:

http://sheenagh.webs.com/