"Ydych chi wedi colli rhywbeth - dan yr eira....have you lost anything - under the snow ? "

(  CIVIC NOTE : If you want to spare yourself my ramblings, and just see how Madrid Players staged Captain Cat and the Drowned Sailors in our 2014 production of Under Milk Wood, scroll straight down to the bottom of the page. Go on, I won't tell anyone. )

 When I started off writing about Under Milk Wood, I had no idea how hard it would be to write about. Theatre, the business of directing a play is essentially a collaborative process. You take all your disparate ideas and influences from your writer, whatever notions of theatrical language and technique you may have picked up from your own teachers along the way, in this case, loose floating bits of legend and folk-tale, whatever music takes you to the heart of your story, and your own experience of life and all the weird little stuff you notice around you every day.  You've got all this stuff rattling round inside your head, and when you open your mouth in your rehearsal space with your script in your hand for the first time, you just have to hope that something minimally coherent falls out. Then if you get really lucky and work with the wildly creative actors and crew that I did, they make Dylan's words, your words,  their own, changing them and improving them in the process, but also being changed in some way by them. So you wind up collaborating with a long-dead writer and a millennial cultural tradition, and the very lively bunch of creative folks in front of you.  When it works, it's a thing of beauty, but trying to write it down on paper or screen as a ( literally ) linear process is like trying to translate Japanese into algebra.

Today, you'll be pleased to hear we've got as far as... page 3 of the script ! Captain Cat and the long-drowned snuggling up to him !

Captain Cat is introduced as "the retired blind seacaptain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of schooner house..." This introduction shows Dylan's full linguistic range at work. The "seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape" makes us hear the sea lapping gently at the door of Captain Cat's house, gives us the water moving beneath our feet as a ship rolls out on the ocean, but at the same time conjures up a liminal figure who belongs not fully to the sea or the land; and from that very first "ship-in-bottled", and the echo of Macbeth's "cabin'd, cribbed, confined", we sense he's trapped, stuck within the four walls of his house, the limitations of his aging body, as surely as a ship in a bottle. And yet he's a man with a rich past : the Cat in his name marks him as a wanderer,  brings to mind the cat o'nine tails, the harshness of a sailor's life, but also his past as a tom-cat, a life "sardined with women."

He has an otherworldly quality. He's a narrator, both living inside the town and sitting outside it telling its story. He's a gatekeeper, the first solid figure introduced as that marvellous opening monologue fades out, leading us in turn into the rest of the village.  I kept coming back to his liminal quality, a man who belongs equally to different worlds : the sea and the land, here-and-now and memory, the living and the dead with whom he seems more comfortable. And of course he's a character in a play which he partly narrates, even in Dylan's unadapted script. This role as blind storyteller gives him an epic quality, a sort of Welsh Homer; and his position as captain of a dead crew, who won't stop talking to him, also conjures up the Ancient Mariner.

( This statue of Captain Cat now stands in Swansea's former Maritime Quarter; fiction overtaking reality.)

All this Liminal Fliminal stuff is fine, but of course, in theatre you have to ground your characters in some sort of reality. So who really is Captain Cat ?

Not many of us these days have met too many sailors ( certainly not in Madrid ! ), but Dylan Thomas just caught the end of the age of Welsh shipping. Swansea, where he grew up, was the second most important port of the British Empire : at the beginning of the 1930s, when as a respectable middle-class kid with an eye for the down-at-heel drinking in the Maritime Quarter, he would have witnessed the decline. On a map of 1880 this area had 14 different pubs, with names to fire the imagination - The Lord Nelson, the Cuba, the Heart's Delight - and presumably as many brothels. He describes the area in his short story "Just Like Little Dogs" as a place where "methelated-spirit drinkers danced into policemen's arms and women like lumps of clothes in a pool waited, in doorways and holes in the soaking wall, for vampires and firemen", an enticing mixture of the exotic and the downright seedy. There's no doubt he would have met a fair number of old men ready to share tales of adventure, from the days when their eyes were blue and bright, when Welsh schooners ran from Swansea Bay to Buenos Aires, round the Horn and up the Pacific coast as far as San Francisco.

                ( Jim Trainor as Captain Cat in Madrid Players' production of Under Milk Wood.)

A world so long gone it's hard to even imagine : maybe the guys who work on oil rigs out at sea, or join the army to get out of some godforsaken one-horse town are the only modern equivalent. Jim Trainor, who played Captain Cat so wonderfully in our production, mentioned he had spoken to Vic, a Madrid Player and a genuine sea-captain; and Vic advised that the basic responsibility of any captain, when everything else goes to shit, is to bring everyone back alive; and that's exactly what Captain Cat failed to do. I think Jim used that as his line through to the sailors who haunt the Captain's dreams.

 In rehearsal with Jim Trainor and Susie Jones ( Rosie Probert ), we also realised that he doesn't actually talk to anyone in the course of the play. He sits at his window, smells the sea, listens and recites the life of the town, recording it as surely as the Reverend Eli, and remembers.

Dylan had an ongoing contact with the port of New Quay, in Ceredigion,where he regularly visited an aunt and cousin in the 1930s, and where he lived in a bungalow ( "Majoda" ) 1944-45.At the time, there were over 35 retired sea-captains from the ocean ships living in the town, and according to David N. Thomas in his article "The Birth of Under Milk Wood", collected in "Dylan Remembered" Volume 2 ( Seren Books, 2004 ), one in 5 of the adult males in the town were master mariners. According to David N., this early section of Under Milk Wood is full of detail from New Quay :  like Llareggub, it's a town which runs steeply down a hill towards the harbour, with a "top and sea-end". Jack Patrick Evans of the Black Lion pub made buttermilk and bred whippets, just like one of the drowned, Dai Fred Davies worked the donkey engine on a local boat and metamorphosed into "Tom-Fred the donkey-man", and Dylan bought his milk at Maes Gwyn farm.

Incidentally, the answer to the question "Who milks the cows at Maesgwyn ?" is "Nobody." By the time UMW premiered in New York, the farm's fields had been swallowed by the sea.

                                                      ( Mary Reid  as Dancing Williams )

So, somewhat unexpectedly, a section of the play which seems like wild fantasy turns out to be full of small precise details taken from the lives of people Dylan knew. And so it's all about memory. Captain Cat remembers the long drowned; who in turn remember the people and places they loved in life.

Now placing Captain Cat as the guardian of memory was, consciously or not, Dylan's masterstroke. The Welsh coastline is itself one long metaphor for memory and forgetfulness, the way that time and tide take everything away eventually. .Along the sweep of Cardigan Bay, the shoreline is constantly shifting, burying washing away sections of beach or burying others under newly established sand dunes : I remember a week spent as a volunteer near Llanystumdwy on Lleyn in 1992, working to build netting over dunes, wooden walkways down to the beach, to try to stem the power of the tide washing the beach across the bay to Harlech - where the church at Llandanwg  regularly has to be dug out from the sand building up around its walls. The opposite effect is represented by the storms of winter 2013-14 , when for a few days  a forest dating back 5000 years briefly emerged from the water near Borth.

Welsh legends are full of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the lost lands of the Welsh Atlantis, which allegedly went under the sea one night when drunken watchmen left the dyke gates open. And of people turned into sea-creatures, seagulls and seals, or of seals become men and women, longing for the sea and the life they can't return to.

 Memory as the struggle to hold back the tide,  to preserve all the things we lose, everything which will eventually be lost. Read like this, when Captain Cat remembers his drowned shipmates, it's not a nightmare, but an act of remembrance, a conscious effort to keep their memory alive : which is the power behind the final exchange, at the end of the play :

Captain Cat : Dancing Williams ?

D.W. : Still dancing.

Captain Cat : Jonah Jarvis ?

J.J. : Still.

Rosie Probert : Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.

 

( Susie Jones as Rosie Probert )

 So in our version of the play, Dancing Williams' line "Remember me, Captain ? " sounds the opening note of a symphony on the theme of memory and remembrance, which reaches its highest point with Rosie Probert, who in the Captain's memory voices the terrible lines : " Remember me....I have forgotten you... I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever...I have forgotten that I was ever born."

And with this perspective,once you look closely, the interweaving of memory, of commemoration and remembrance, the efforts the characters keep the fragile structure of their lives from washing into the sea, run everywhere through the play. The young fantasise about the lives they will have in the future; the old remember.

There are at least four graves : "Hannah Rees, beloved wife", where the owl swoops in Bethesda graveyard; the grave of Gomer Owen, which Bessie Bighead tends so lovingly; and " Llareggub Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples who dwelt in the region of Llarregub before the Celts had left the Land of Summer"; and the tombstone Cherry Owen falls asleep on.But the town is full of all sorts of less formal memorials : the Reverend Eli records the White Book of Llareggub,  remembering his father of whom there is no known likeness; Polly Garter sings about poor dead Willie Wee as she hangs out the washing; in the houses of the sleepers, we find "the yellowing, dickybird-watching pictures of the dead"; and as dusk falls on the town, the lamps in the windows call back the dead, who have run away to sea. Even Mary Ann Sailors recording her age each day from her window, Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard listing her dead husbands' daily tasks, and Captain Cat's careful listing of each of the town children on their way to school could be an effort to hold onto something fleeting and transient, although we didn't specifically go in that direction.

The Welsh traditional music we used in the show was a chosen to reflect this, in itself a commemoration of generations of nameless musicians, disappeared in time and invisible to history, who forged this musical culture.

We also took inspiration from Delyth Jenkins, who graciously allowed us to use our harp music. She describes in the liner notes to her CD Aros ( Welsh for "stay" ) how when her daughters were children, they used to pick wild flowers from the hedges and place them on Bedd y Morwyr ( The Sailor's Grave ) the grave of an unknown sailor washed up on the beach and buried in the churchyard of one of the villages near Swansea. 

Memory, and remembrance.Messing about with MovieMaker one evening I tried combining some footage of a village drowned beneath a reservoir ( it was posted with the claim that it's Tryweryn, but it's not ) with the soundtrack to the 1987 Anthony Hopkins version :

The night we put this together in the Madrid Players Clubhouse was one of the most magical theatrical experiences I've, well, experienced. We gave each of the sailors a backstory, and a specific relationship with Captain Cat; then we went into the shadow theatre, backlighting Polly Garter's sheet from the washing line, since we felt the floating, slightly insubstantial nature of shadow work would give an appropriately dreamlike atmosphere, and reflect the undersea location of the long drowned ( it also let me cast a string of talented women as turn of the century Welsh sailors ). But really, I just let loose Mary Reid, Suzie Gilmour, Brianna Garcia, Harvey Holtom, Parisa Aryan and Suzie Jones to build the sequence up after raiding the cellar for props. Couldn't tell you who came up with what, but we worked hard to keep it grounded, as far as you can ground the ghosts of drowned sailors in their former Captain's nightmares. Alba Sola added the magic of her fiddle to proceedings later.

 So ( AT LAST ! ) here's what we made of it...

                                          ( Filmed by J. Daniel Montemayor. Thanks, Dani ! )

My Dad had been a sailor in his youth, with the British navy in the Mediterranean, and sometimes talked about Malta and Cephallonia in the 1950s.  As my parents grew older, I watched their horizons shrink, until eventually the village and its life pretty much became the limits of their world. My Mum had always been a bit Mary Ann Sailors with a harder edge and no religion, essentially content with her life, her craftwork, her place in the world. I think Dad always missed the sea, though - he often talked about getting a boat, although it never came to anything. He still had so many things he wanted to do. In his last summer,before we took him down to the nursing home where he died, he talked about getting his health back, and how he'd like to go on a cruise. The characterisation of Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood was all Jim Trainor, but there was one move, which maybe Jim remembers but I doubt anyone else would spot, which I directed for a reason : a single small memorial.

Coming next :  two of my favourite UMW characters : Myfanwy Price ! Mr. Mog Edwards !

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! )

Always, we begin again.

Teaching is perhaps one of the stranger  jobs around. There’s a cyclical nature to the work, in the sense that each September, each January, the work that falls to you is likely to be pretty similar to the previous September, the previous January. It’s a handy check, really : mid-September, if you’re standing in front of a class of 25-30 assorted individuals, each with their individual needs, ambitions and personality disorders, probably none of them with an intrinsic desire to sit down, settle down and study, then the chances are you’re a teacher. If you’re jumping out of an aeroplane, rushing into a burning building, sweeping up horse manure, tasering a suspected criminal, then the chances are you’re not. A teacher. At least, I hope not.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the job : schools run on routine. Bells ring; children enter school. Teacher says “ Good morning class/ladies and gentlemen/7A” :  children stop talking and listen ( you hope ). Class lasts 40 minutes, with a starter, a main focus, and a plenary session to sum up at the end ( unless it’s one of those disintegrates-into-confusion-as-teacher-runs-for-the-door affairs I’ve been known to “facilitate” ). Bells ring; everyone off to playtime.  Although they’ll tell you the exact opposite, children thrive on routine and love the teachers who impose it, because it means they know what to do. 

And yet. There are days when it feels like you’re pushing a boulder up the hill. Again. The same bloody boulder  you rolled up yesterday. And the day before.  Or last year, on this very same day. And if you’re really unlucky, you’ll have a twerp dancing on top of the boulder telling you to get it to the top of the hill in half the time, assessing how well you roll it, giving you forms to fill out explaining the boulder while you roll it up, demanding that you roll it up MORE CREATIVELY. There are moments when I wonder if the patron saint of teachers is not Thomas Aquinas, but Sisyphus, an ancient Greek curriculum co-ordinator who was late handing in his documentation and so was condemned by the angry gods to roll boulders up hills for all Eternity.

If you’ve ever felt like this, Albert Camus might have some appeal for you.

There’s another deadening aspect to routine, as well. I’m reminded of Johnny, the horse which was owned by the grandfather of Gabriel, the central character in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Johnny had been a mill horse, spending his days walking round and round in a circle to drive a starch mill; then Johnny’s owner thought he’d like to “ drive out with the quality to a military review in the park.” So he harnessed Johnny up to his carriage, and drove out through Dublin : as far as the statue of King William III, at which point Johnny began happily walking round and round in circles around the statue, pulling the carriage behind him. 

Always we begin again.

Joyce’s story-within-a-story ( ironically, clearly told time-after-time at a family Christmas party, always the same people at the same place at the same time doing the same thing every year ) is a metaphor of the spiritual paralysis which ( as he saw it ) gripped Dublin and Ireland as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth; but always reminds me that the cycle of the familiar can be safe, can be comforting, yet can give us the illusion of action, movement, progress, while taking us nowhere.

Always, we begin again. This phrase is often attributed to the Rule of St. Benedict, although it’s more a summary of the spirit of the rule than a direct quotation; it’s appropriate to teaching, in a sense, since in some ways the medieval monasteries are the ancestors of the teaching profession. The monks needed to divide the day up between assigned activities, prayer and work and study, each signalled by bells : so they devised the first timetables. Since Christianity was a religion of books, and wealthy patrons tended to dedicate young family members as oblates who might grow up to be  politically or practically useful, they developed a need for the teaching of literacy. The idea of a college, a fellowship of scholars dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, began here. Of course, in modern staff rooms, we don’t usually take vows of poverty ( no need, really ), obedience, silence, or indeed chastity.

Ancient history, of course. And yet…Benedict’s rule was a set of guidelines for those following the religious life in community, and those few words at least still have some relevance for people working in complex organisations, interacting with people from many different places, with all their different personal histories, their hopes, experiences and ambitions, and the stresses and conflicts which inevitably arise.

Benedict  did call his Rule “ a little rule for beginners.” I love that combination, “ little” and “beginners”. 

We live in a world stuffed full of experts. Every day, I receive a few e-mails from experts, offering to sell my school their expertise.Some of whom have so much expertise that they long ago left behind any responsibility for the things they’re experts about. And increasingly it seems to me that everyone has an opinion about everything, and it’s always so strongly stated. Sometimes I get the impression that I may be the only person left in the world who really doesn’t have a clue.

 So it’s nice to be reminded about the beginners, because in honesty, that might be all of us. It’s tough for teachers to think in these terms, because our role in a school insists that we take the role of experts : we’re supposed to know more than the kids. Yet  it’s worth thinking about what it means to be a beginner : stepping into an unknown situation, open to something new, making yourself vulnerable, trusting. To try to look with beginner’s eyes, as if we’re seeing things for the first time, to try not to go round in the same circle just because it’s there. Not to be trapped by our roles, by our identities, by the state of past relationships, and to imagine what it would be like to start again. Especially, to let go of our achievements : if we see ourselves as beginners, what matters is this day, now, this conversation, this step on our journey.

It’s an odd, and slightly bewildering idea, but instinctively I know there’s some truth here : my twenty-five years of teaching have shaped the way I think about the job; and because of that, I think the way I’ve always thought, and see what I’ve always seen. Strange, but I'm more aware now than ever before of how much I don't know and the things I have to learn.

Although I’ve borrowed from Benedict, I think all wisdom traditions have a version of this idea. I’ve read that Zen Buddhism has a practice called “Shosin” which is just this : the “Beginner’s Mind”, openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace the beginner as opposed to the expert.

I’ve always loved a line from E.E. Cummings, from his poem “My father moved through dooms of love “ : “ And even if it’s Sunday, may i be wrong, for wherever men are right they are not young.”

This post is very largely babbling, because I’m still thinking my way through this. In some ways I think I might be an odd person to be involved in school leadership. Or perhaps just an odd person. Anyway, best wishes to all good teaching folk ( and non-teaching folk, for that matter ) wherever you may be.

 And here’s to another term of absurd heroics.

Ho, ho, ho...

Santa Claus dropped into Kensington School on Friday, as he does on the last day of every Christmas term, with the traditional red coat, a bell to announce his arrival, and a sackful of sweets for all the youngest children. I’m not sure how he got on in Nursery and Reception, although I think he did well – some years the youngest children burst out crying at the sight of him – but in Year 1 and 2, with the 5 and 6-year-olds, things went o.k. 

 Some classes make it easy for Santa : they’re scaffolding a class letter to Father Christmas or the Three Kings when he walks in, so he can read what the children want for Christmas straight off the board. He always asks the class teacher if the children have been good, and asks the children to sing him a carol or a Christmas song – Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer always makes him happy ( he knows the words for that one ), although the one Year 1 sang this year about vampires sucking blood on Halloween got extra marks for originality. Rudolph is always very popular, so he gets the chance to explain how Rudolph is sitting up on the flat roof, looking after the sleigh, enjoying a good merienda of a carrot with ice cream.

In Year 2, Santa sometimes runs up against the sceptics : children who think he’s Mr. Williams  ( too tall !  ) or Mr. Pérez ( really ? With a British accent ? ) dressed up.

This year Santa mistimed his escape ( beard-related crisis, I hear ), was faced with having to cross a playground full of  hysterical five-year-olds, and after an intense negotiation to stop them pulling his coat off or his trousers down, had to beat an undignified retreat to the Key Stage One Staff Room for half an hour until the coast was clear. Apparently, with the under-fives, One Direction simply can't compete. It's Santamania all the way down there.

I always enjoy the day Santa comes to school. As an adult, I know he’s just a story, invented by some American bloke out of old German and Norse folktales, since taken and used to sell a million pieces of crap that nobody seriously wants or needs; but once a year at least, he’s a story who gets up and walks, at least for the youngest children. I’m never in any doubt that when they look at Santa, for them, he’s as real as their teacher.

And what a story it is : once a year, on that one special night, there’s someone who travels  through the darkness across the entire world, looking after every child in every part of every country, wealthy or poor, bringing them a gift that will make them happy for a while : and asking for nothing in return.  Wouldn’t you want to believe in something like that ?

Reading it back, perhaps I shouldn’t have written “he’s just a story”; after all, humans are the animals who tell stories. The stories we tell are the imaginative spaces we share, and which enable us to communicate with one another, to accept and acknowledge the human experiences we share, rather than as so often the things which divide us; and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives make up our identities, and shape the people we become. In that context, there are worse stories to share than Santa.

                                                                       Shared Santa.

Perhaps the best Santa Claus story I know is a story about the story; Santa doesn't put in an appearance, which is kind of the point.  “To Everything There is a Season” was written in the 1970s by the Canadian writer Alastair Macleod, and published in his collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. He writes in the persona of an eleven-year-old boy growing up on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, I guess in the 1940s, excited about the approaching Christmas season, worried about his father’s failing health, waiting with anticipation for the return of his older brother who is working halfway across Canada on the Great Lakes, the story seen and narrated from  the child’s side of adulthood.

“I am troubled myself about the nature of Santa Claus and I am trying to hang onto him in any way that I can. It is true that at my age I no longer really believe in him; yet I have hoped in his possibilities as fiercely as I can, much in the same way, I think, that the drowning man waves desperately to the lights of the passing ship on the high sea’s darkness. For without him, as without the man’s ship, it seems our fragile lives would be so much more desperate.”

His brother Neil arrives back just in time for Christmas, with boxes and bag full of “clothes”s, and is clearly shocked by the state of his father’s health; the family’s Christmas routines and rituals run on as every year, until it’s time to go to bed on Christmas Eve.

“After we have stabled the horse we talk with our parents and eat the meal our mother has prepared. And then I am sleepy and it is time for the younger children to be in bed. But tonight my father says to me, “We would like you to stay up with us a while,” and so I stay quietly with the older members of my family.

When all is silent upstairs, Neil brings in the cartons that contain his “clothes” and begins to open them. He unties the intricate knots quickly, their whorls faling away beneath his agile fingers. The boxes are filled with gifts neatly wrapped and bearing tags. The ones for my younger brothers say “from Santa Claus” but mine are not among them anymore, as I know with certainty they never will be again. Yet I am not so much surprised as touched by a pang of loss at being here on the adult side of the world. It is as if I have suddenly moved into another room and heard a door click lastingly behind me. I am jabbed by my own small wound.

But then I look at those before me. I look at my parents drawn together before the Christmas tree. My mother has her hand upon my father’s shoulder and he is holding his ever-present handkerchief. I look at my sisters who have crossed this threshold ahead of me and now each day journey further from the lives they knew as girls. I look at my magic older brother who has come to us this Christmas from half a continent away, bringing everything he has and is. All of them are captured in the tableau of  their care.

“Every man moves on,” says my father quietly, and I think he speaks of Santa Claus, “but there is no need to grieve. He leaves good things behind.”

Wherever you are, have a peaceful and restful Christmas : here's to further shared endeavours in the New Year,

( And if you want a Santa Claus reboot, here’s a Christmas card from Neil Gaiman.  : )   )

The Sailors Arms

Tomorrow's Dylan Thomas's birthday, October 27th. 1914, and a few of us will be meeting in the James Joyce pub in Madrid to drink some beer and read some poems for his birthday.I've already blogged fairly extensively about Dylan Thomas and his relationship with pubs back in February; so just a few words more.

Early on last Autumn, farting around on Youtube, I came across this, two minutes of a Scottish TV Cold War thriller with the great Peter Capaldi quoting "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."

In theatre, context is everything.

I knew from here I wanted to set our adaptation of Under Milk Wood inside the White Horse Tavern in New York, which would metamorphose into The Sailors Arms, the pub in Llareggub.  I'd always read this as one of the central passages of UMW  :

"Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms.

SINBAD :  Here's to me, Sinbad."

This is more than a joke about a Village That Time Forgot; and I think it's more than a veteran boozer's fantasy. Pubs are like theatres, or churches, they're spaces which may not be exactly sacred, but space inside is defined like sacred space : you have the threshold, a line that you cross beyond which the rules, the rituals, and the expected behaviour are different. Human relationships work differently inside a pub, in the sense that it's a place which makes everyone equal; and time is measured out in unique ways : time for one more; one for the road; opening and closing time; last orders; and the coveted lock-in. For a man like Dylan, anxious to lose himself and the mess that his adult life had become by the end, it's not hard to see how this could be a kind of sanctuary, a shelter from the storm.

And the Sailors Arms is tended by a shapeshifter, a figure who is simultaneously a bartender and an adventurer from the 1,001 Nights. Inside this pub you can be whoever you want to be : outside there's only reality.

                                         

                                                                

And I've always been taken by the line "The Sailors Arms is always open.", repeated in the play. I've always felt this carries echoes of the story of the Prodigal Son ( and there's no question that Dylan knew his Bible ), establishing this pub as the place you can always return to, no matter what sort of disaster your life is : a place of unjudging love.

We could really have laboured this point in the show, and probably would have, if it had been left to me : fortunately, James and Daryl approached that section of the text through their characters, and what was a joy to one - permanent opening hours - was misery to the other - a life sentence behind the bar. The way they played it worked beautifully, so we left it.

But the earlier idea was why I was cheeky enough to write a little prologue and epilogue for our adaptation   ( borrowing from other Dylan texts) : I wanted to show the bar before the rules of storytelling imposed their logic, and their own way of measuring out time; and I wanted to see what happens when, as it must, the spell is broken, the theatre closes,  the bartender invites the pub raconteur to go home.

In November 1953, when Dylan was lying in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York with no hope of recovery , as the word filtered back home, his friends naturally made their way to the pubs where they used to drink. As Trevor Hughes, a Swansea friend living in London, later told Colin Edwards :

" Only the mean could remember this man in meanness...at the news of his illness I went back to the Fitzroy Tavern, where, I felt, I might get near to him. I had some irrational idea that I was contemplating, not the death of a drunk, but the moving of a great man into the mystic night, and that I, helpless, could only love, and question not, and seek to uphold, even after death."

I tried to hide this text somewhere in our version of the play.

I thought I was being really clever with the White Horse idea, and breaking the fourth wall at the end  ( not that we had much of a fourth wall to start with ) : but watching the last couple of minutes of the recent BBC Wales adaptation, these were clearly just ideas whose time had come.

See you tomorrow !


                                        

 ( Photo of the James Joyce copyright Michael Johnstone - thanks, Mike ! )

This side of the truth

With the Dylan Thomas centenary just round the corner, I thought I'd put this up : it's the poem in Dylan's own hand, from the book "Dylan Thomas : The Pubs", by Jeff Towns ( Y Lolfa ). Kind of focuses the debate about Dylan - it sounds beautiful, and I think full of feeling; a critic would ask if you really need that many words ?  Dylan always worked from the sound of words back towards meaning.