If, at night, you drive east from Swansea (Wales’ second city), round Swansea Bay, with the Bristol Channel on your right hand, in just a few miles you will catch your first glimpse of what could almost be mistaken for fairy lights shimmering in the distance. As you get closer, you realise they are, rather more mundanely, the lights of the Port Talbot steelworks. Port Talbot is home to some 37,000 people, and has, since the 1920s, been producing high-grade steel. From its peak in the 1960s, when it employed 18,000 people, the steelworks has scaled back its workforce, but still employs 4,000, and is one of the largest steelworks in Europe, producing over 3.5 million tonnes of steel annually, and capable of producing almost 5 million. However, the current owners are threatening to close the works. What that will mean for the town is unimaginable.

Apart from steel, I can think of only two things for which Port Talbot is noteworthy. One is the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence (a classic celebration of British eccentricity). The second is the number of prominent people who have emerged from this South Wales industrial town. Let me pick out two politicians. The first is Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister and, arguably, the man who triggered (possibly unwittingly) Thatcher’s stepping down from the leadership election after her leadership was challenged following Howe’s resignation from the Government.

The second is George Thomas, a Labour politician who became a government minister and later won even greater national prominence as the Speaker of the House of Commons when the proceedings of the house were first broadcast on radio. His call for “Order! Order!” delivered in his distinctive South Wales accent was instantly recognizable.

It is in fact three other Port Talbot boys with distinctive voices that I particularly want to focus on this week: Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen. Only one of them (Hopkins) was actually born in Port Talbot, but the other two were educated and grew up there, and I do believe that education, in the area I am focusing on, matters more than accident of birthplace. Interestingly, Hopkins, the one who was born there, was educated elsewhere in South Wales.

If you are a South Wales actor with a glorious voice, then, at some stage in your career, you are going to take on the biggest role in Welsh theatre: a role known, prosaically, only as First Voice. It is the senior of the two narrators in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. For those of you who don’t know it, Under Milk Wood is an evocation, through glimpsed scenes from the lives of its inhabitants, of the vibrant life of Llareggub, an imagined small South Wales rural fishing and farming town.

Conceived as a radio play, it has, in the 69 years since its BBC premiere, been adapted for the cinema twice. The 1972 production was very prestigious, starred Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, and is a classic illustration of a particular kind of cultural tone-deafness.

Dylan Thomas had a poet’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the words to capture that detail. Here are the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, as spoken by Voice One. You may want to listen to Dylan Thomas himself speaking these lines in a live performance. (The audio quality is pretty poor, so reading along is advised. This speech is from 0:00 to 2:06.)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

Word pictures tumble one after another out of these lines. Thomas has sufficient confidence in the power of his words to ease up, and let them speak for themselves. Now take a deep breath and see how the cloth-eared makers of the 1972 film sought to ‘enhance’ these pictures with their own, and I hope you will agree with me that not only are these pictures superfluous; they are also inaccurate and distracting, and they actually weaken the impact of the language. Here is the opening scene of the 1972 film. (2:45-4:38).

Turning to the work as a whole, there is a tendency, I suspect, to play up the humour of the piece. Many of the characters certainly have a comic side to them. The piece is built in such a way that disparate characters appear fleetingly and the narrators offer the only obvious over-arching structure. This makes it easy for the cast to play up the characters’ idiosyncrasies, and go for easy laughs; it also makes it easier for the audience to treat the characters as objects of amusement.

And yet…

If you have ever lived in South Wales, then you will know that none of these characters is as much of a caricature as they might appear to outsiders. There is something about life in the small towns and villages of the South Wales valleys that breeds larger-than-life characters, each with her own distinctive voice, each determined to live his life according to his convictions and passions.

The South Wales valleys were, traditionally, coal-mining valleys, and every town had its own male voice choir and rugby team, and many had their own brass band. If you spend upwards of 55 hours a week underground breathing coaldust, and working some shifts in a Welsh winter you go a week without ever seeing the sun, then you want to run free on the rugby field or fill your lungs and let your voice ring out when you do emerge from the pit. If your working week is spent risking your life in an environment fraught with danger, then you want to be sure to live to the full what precious time you get above ground.

In Under Milk Wood, I would suggest, Thomas is seeking to capture a world that was already disappearing, a world that celebrated life with such gusto. He relished the memories of his own childhood, and, particularly on his last, fatal tour of America, he must have felt very much severed from his roots. The humour in the piece must not, I feel, overwhelm the feeling that these are people whose lives have value, that they represent a world that is fading and that we should strive to keep alive. I have read that learning about Hiroshima and Auschwitz made Thomas acutely aware of the fragility of local culture and drove his desire to immortalise the Wales in which he had grown up.

Bernice and I saw a stage production in London, decades ago, that was very enjoyable, but that did not really acknowledge that side of the piece, and, indeed, many productions do miss that. In fairness, both the original Burton radio production, and a production released on CD starring Anthony Hopkins, largely avoid this trap.

The reason why I am writing about the play now is because last week Bernice and I watched, on our National Theatre at Home subscription, Michael Sheen as First and Second Voice in an innovative production which reopened the Olivier Theatre after Covid as a theatre in the round. This was really an adaptation, adding a framing story to the play. While critics were unanimous in praising Sheen’s performance, opinions were divided about the framing device. I, for one, think it was a brilliant concept and superbly executed.

The production is set in an old age home; one inmate, who is suffering from dementia, receives an unscheduled visit from his estranged son (Sheen), who is, we learn, a writer with, it appears, drink and anger management problems. (There is no great leap of imagination needed to identify the son with Dylan Thomas himself.) Desperate to connect and reconcile with his father, and unable to get any response from the old man, the son eventually tries painting, for his father, the picture of the town that features in his father’s old photo album, from the father’s own childhood as the son of the town preacher. At this point, the son launches into the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, only speaking them with a passion and intensity that reflect his need to get some reaction from his father. At this point, the other inmates and the staff of the home assume the characters of the inhabitants of the imagined/remembered town, and the play continues to its conclusion.

This framing device seems to me a magnificent metaphor for Thomas’s desperate attempt to preserve/revive the South Wales of his (imagined) memory. It also invests the characters with a great dignity. Ultimately, their vivid creation has the power to restore the father to an awareness that makes it possible for him to fleetingly remember his past and, momentarily, even recognize and  embrace his son, before slipping again into oblivion, making it possible for the son to leave, at least partly comforted.

Excellent ensemble playing includes Sian Philips, now 88, improbably but utterly convincingly playing the young promiscuous unmarried mother Polly Garter, who declares:

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where’s their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You’re looking up at me now. I know what you’re thinking, you poor little milky creature. You’re thinking, you’re no better than you should be, Polly, and that’s good enough for me. Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

However, this production is, more than anything, a celebration of the incredible power of Sheen’s performance. Here he is delivering, again, those opening lines, and not holding back!

Sheen’s evocation of an entire world not only brings the father back from oblivion for a short time, but also holds the audience spellbound for 90 minutes that feel like half that time.

If, after reading this blog, you would like the full experience of Under Milk Wood, then you could do worse than take out a subscription to ntathome. Failing that, I strongly recommend the 90-minute 1954 BBC radio production with Burton: a straight performance that celebrates the pure power of Thomas’s prose-poetry.

Meanwhile (you knew that was coming), Tao is designing his own tractor, and Raphael is working on perfecting his facial expressions. There’s no such thing as down time!