Two Minutes to Midnight

" In late October 1952, the United States proclaimed the successful test of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more destructive than the atomic bombs that had ended the war in the Pacific.  Then in July 1953, the Soviet Union unexpectedly exploded its first hydrogen bomb...The Doomsday Clock, a chilling metaphor whose image appears on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reached two minutes before midnight. The hands would not come as close to midnight again for the rest of the twentieth century."
 -  Jonathan R. Eller, from The Story of Fahrenheit 451.


And if we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch and go.


Under Milk Wood was written at approximately the same time,  and belongs very much to the same period as George Orwell's 1984 or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It might be stretching a point to see the structure of the play, the period of light between two darknesses, as a response to the horrors of the Blitz, of Hiroshima and the images of the concentration camps which had been shown in British cinema newsreels in April 1945,  the widespread fear of the atomic bomb and the anticipated Third World War; and yet these themes were very much in Dylan Thomas's mind - and everyone elses's - as he wrote the play.

While he worked in the daytime writing propaganda films for the BBC, Dylan had spent nights as a fire-watcher during the Blitz on London, and so had undoubtedly lived through this. He was also deeply affected by the destruction of the centre of Swansea, his home town, in a three-night blitz which killed 233 people in February 1941. His friend the communist grocer Bert Trick, an ARP warden, recorded meeting Dylan : " As I stood on the corner facing where the office had been the night before, there was nothing but a heaving mass of smouldering buildings. Oxford Street and the Market - all that had been flattened, and there were firemen's hoses snaking all over the mounds. And when I stood there, who should come round the corner but Dylan and Caitlin...he said "Bert, our Swansea has died. Our Swansea has died. " And by God, he was right. The Swansea we knew, the pubs , the places, were gone, and gone for all time."

One product of this was Return Journey, a semi-autobiographical radio play in which a shadowy narrator-figure returns to the devastated post-Blitz Swansea in search of  "Young Thomas". Although it aims to mix humour in with nostalgia, there's none of the chirpy "Britain can take it" attitude on display here, or the deep humour and melancholy late afternoon sun of UMW  - it's a dark, depressed thing, so gloomy it's a miracle it was ever broadcast.

 He wrote little poetry directly concerned with war, but that little included the mighty "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London". More about this in a later post, but this poem sees Dylan imagining Doomsday, wondering how that last moment might be, on the banks of the River Thames, and responding with a type of democratization of an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of elegaic praise-poetry, written for a child he never knew.

It points to a  developing interest in Dylan's poetry in the theme of innocence : the innocence of childhood, linked to the innocence of the countryside as an Edenic state of nature, often the Carmarthenshire countryside of his childhood holidays. Innocence as a positive value,  protection in the face of horror.

Although Fern Hill is perhaps the best-loved of these later poems, I think the twin themes of the countryside and childhood as a place of innocence, a refuge from the horrors of twentieth-century life, is best represented by the beautiful opening to "In Country Sleep", a tender late poem recalling the bedtime story-telling which was his "shared time" with his daughter Aeronwy :

"Never and never , my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
                              My dear, my dear,
out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep , good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise..."

And later :

" The country is holy : O bide in that country kind,
                                 Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace." 

O.K. : so what's all this got to do with Under Milk Wood, and producing/directing it ?  Well, the first half of UMW was originally sold to the BBC under the title "The Town That Was Mad.", along with notes outlining the intended development. This section ends with Willy Nilly the Postman wandering through Llareggub delivering the mail to the townsfolk; Dylan's plan outlines that he was intending a letter to be delivered to Captain Cat, as the senior member of the community : it was to be a communication from a government ministry ( the "Ministry of Sanity" , perhaps ), indicating that, owing to complaints received that all the inhabitants of Llareggub were completely mad, an Inspector was coming down to investigate. It might be necessary to quarantine the inhabitants of the village, to stop the madness spreading to the surrounding area.

Dylan's planned ending was to have a meeting at the town hall, in which the Sanity Inspector was to pronounce his findings. The villagers of Llareggub, initially outraged at the slur on their reputation, would have demanded that the Inspector offer a description of a perfectly sane town from the outside world, against which they could be judged. Halfway through the description of sanity as it stood in the 1940s, Captain Cat would have interrupted, and the villagers would have demanded unanimously to be declared insane and quarantined.

"The Town That Was Mad" was never completed, and the second half, written at speed in 1953, went in a very different direction. But I think knowing Dylan's original intention casts useful light on the early, pre-dawn dreams of the villagers. In Llareggub, every human being is precious, and it is their dreams that make them so. It also helps to find the the tone of the piece : there is satire at the expense of characters like Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, the Pughs or the Reverend Eli Jenkins, but it's never dark or biting, and  always a warm, understanding irony. All the characters are strange, and all slightly crazy : but they are all sympathetic, and however flawed are all fundamentally and deeply innocent.

Written too much, one last thing to share.

In November 1950, Dylan sent the poem "In the White Giant's Thigh" to the magazine Botteghe Oscure, together with a note about outlining a poem he was planning to write about the end of the world, to be called "In Country Heaven."  I've transposed his plan underneath, retaining his punctuation and paragraphing.

This synopsis was in my head for the 3 months we worked on UMW, and although I kept it away from the cast ( Apologies : if we'd started by reading this, you'd have thought I was even more crazy than in fact you did.), I think it's somewhere there in the very beginning and end of the play. ( I did, I think, once mention to Eva that I wanted Suo Gan to sound like "the love of God", which might not have been the most helpful direction.)

Enough babbling : over to Dylan.

"The plan of this long poem-to-be is grand and simple, though the grandeur will seem, to many, to be grandiose, and the simplicity crude and sentimental.

The godhead, the author, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, the beginning word, the anthropomorphic bawler-out and black-baller, the quintessence, scapegoat, martyr, maker - He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called His country, one of His worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And when He weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the poem-to-be, He weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges, and, among themselves, in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedge-row rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten : and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow men who were once of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and his tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairs-breadth of the mind, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all you and I know and do not know. The poem-to-be is made of these tellings.

And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the earth.

It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies.

It is a poem about happiness."

The Tale and the Teller.

                         Through voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead.


 A key element in the development of Under Milk Wood was the time Dylan spent at the BBC in the war years, writing propaganda films, and the radio broadcast work that developed from this. As many commentators have noted, his poetry moved away from the intensely complex,  introverted and opaque qualities of the notebook poems of his Swansea years, towards a greater clarity and a greater sense of a direct audience ( without ever making him an entirely easy poet to read.)

It seems hard to deny the influence on Under Milk wood of  this type of broadcast work.

It's not Dylan's work, but he moved in these circles, and the movement from the general to the particular, from the collective to the individual, seems to me to be reminiscent of UMW. It would be interesting to film a section of the play - perhaps Willy Nilly delivering the post - in black-and-white, 50s Pathé newsreel style.

I think that's where the structure of UMW came from : but what worked well as a 1950s newsreel, or a radio play, simply won't work in a stage production. Characters in plays need reasons to be on the stage, interaction with other characters, motives for standing up and speaking : running the narrators of UMW as disembodied voices, or ( perhaps worse ) embodied but irrelevant voices, reminds me of a line from Harri Webb's poem Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel : "It is, of course, God, the well-known television personality." ( You can find the complete poem here. )

The 1971 film version opens with a promising solution, with Richard Burton playing the spirit of a dead man revisiting what we assume is his home village, accompanied by Ryan Davies, who may or may not be the Devil. It's a clever idea, faithful to Dylan's writing, grown out of the Drowned Sailors of UMW, and the two boys out  picking up girls  in Just Like Little Dogs ( Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog ). The opening sequence, sadly no longer on Youtube, as the two spirits wander through the empty, moonlit town in the wee small hours, is touched by melancholic genius. As the film progresses, however, it all gets a bit tiresome because of the lack of dramatic content - the two men have nothing to do in the town, no reason to take an interest in the townspeople and so no real interaction with them, and they finish up looking like a pair of bored teenagers hanging out in Llarregub because the shopping mall's not been built yet.

So what to do ? When Dylan's boyhood friend and literary executor Daniel Jones prepared the play for publication in 1954, he followed the version performed in New York the previous Autumn, where Dylan had split the narration into two separate voices to save the actors' voices : but there is no evidence Dylan intended to publish the text in this form, and some evidence at least that he thought of the narration as a single voice. If you're interested in the arguments here, it's worth checking the introduction to the Definitive Edition of Under Milk Wood, prepared by Walford Davies and Ralph Maude ( J.M. Dent, 1995 ).

I found the key in Dylan's own writing. Although Under Milk Wood has two formal narrators, in fact at different times different townsfolk take over the narration : most obviously Captain Cat, who has a whole section where he describes what he hears as the town awakes; but also Mog Edwards, in a long letter he writes to his lover Myfanwy Price; Mrs. Pugh, who describes everything she can see from her top-of-the-town window; and a guidebook, which bizarrely reads itself ( although we cut this : no alienation in our version of Llarregub ! ). Tantalisingly, the Reverend Eli Jenkins is writing his own description of the town, although in Dylan's text he never reads from it directly.

So, as we adapted it, we eliminated the characters of First and Second Voice altogether, and extended this   ( bad pun coming up ) playful approach, spreading the narrative around five principal characters. I can't claim this as original - I nicked the idea from a really well-documented University of Warwick production whose details I found here.

I think this was the single best decision we made in the course of the production. Once you spread the narration around, you open up your production to all the strange magic which is sitting there in the language of this astonishing text, just waiting for the creativity of your performers to release it. We quickly had things happening in our rehearsal space that I could never have planned, as we found layers of meaning in Dylan's words which can only be released when spoken dramatically, away from an authoritative disembodied narrator.

As I adapted, I had been particularly concerned to bring some female voices into the narration ( I was a bit worried about Dylan's women, often seen as either passive and distant objects of desire or objects of fear )
I thought I heard the voice of a young girl, just on the threshold of adulthood, in some of the more sensual, lazy, descriptive passages in the second half of the play, and suddenly Mae Rose Cottage, a relatively minor character in Dylan's play, had stepped up as a storyteller.

Intuition rather than plan, but as the storytelling passed between her and Captain Cat, between May and December, the old man living with his memories and the young girl with all her hopes and dreams, I found we had a play about endings, and beginnings, and everything in between.

                   ...peels off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave 
                   in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mr. Right
                   to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a 
                   brilliantined trout.

 

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