Culture highlight 2024: A madcap Under Milk Wood and the loveliest of novels

Jon Gower

The most joyous book of the year was Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds, deservedly the winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.

A cross-generational portrait of British Ghanaians, arranged over three summers and connecting South London with West Africa, it’s a book suffused with love to the point of being an antidote to these bleak times.

It’s also chock full of music, from the infectious beats of its prose to the many references to African music, including lots of jangling highlife guitar, which made me create my own soundtrack to reading. And as a consequence to the music there’s oodles of dancing, too:

Dancing is the one thing that can solve Stephen’s problems.

At Church with his family, the shimmer of Black hands raised in praise. With his band, making music speaking not just to their hardships, but their joys. Grooving with his best friend, so close their heads might touch. Dancing alone to his father’s records, uncovering parts of a man he has never truly known. His youth, shame and sacrifice.

Stephen has only ever known himself in song. But what becomes of him when the music fades?

Warm hearted

The author himself is as warm hearted as his dancing characters and blessed with a generous spirit. When I interviewed him at the Hay Festival I warned him that I had been so moved by his depiction of Small Worlds that we might well end up crying on stage, which indeed was the case. So it was all the more pleasing when my eldest daughter loved the novel, too and went on to read Nelson’t first book with equal pleasure.

What is perhaps the most important book published in Wales in the past decade fittingly won this year’s Wales Book of the Year Award. I’ve already written about Tom Bullough’s Sarn Helen so I’ll just mention that I’ve just re-read it.

And did so with untrammelled pleasure, albeit tempered by concern about the climate emergency, itself seemingly confirmed by the ferocity of Storm Darragh which pounded the walls of the house as I turned its pages.

Under Milk Wood, Volcano Theatre, Swansea (Credit: Volcano)Irreverent

Volcano Theatre’s Paul Davies has been destroying books and texts with energy and gusto for a long time. For his irreverent dismantling of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood he might as well have sent in the sappers to dynamite the root stocks of the trees as he did pretty much everything else in his powers to re-present the play in a new way.

This wasn’t the first time he had visited the text with no respect whatsoever. There was the show’s first outing in the Gower Heritage Centre with a cast of Albanian actors and an on-stage Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, all under the direction of Branko Brezovec. There was something about the production that led to the rights being withdrawn by the Dylan Thomas estate, so this new version has all the hallmarks of a samizdat edition, smuggled into the future.

In the production at Volcano’s home on Swansea High Street Paul Davies was aided and abetted by a top-drawer assemblage of performers who delivered a deliriously high-octane reversioning of the polyphonic voices of Llareggub’s OTT characters.

To give you a sense of things Christopher Elson, a stalwart of Volcano shows of late, invited an audience member to take one end of some dental floss which he unfurled from a container in his mouth.

Human dynamos

It seemingly became lengths of spider gossamer, connecting things, much as does Under Milk Wood its characters, the floss ultimately becoming a garotte, strangulating Elson’s character as if he were a bluebottle. A Conventional take on Thomas?

Not one iota. Aisling Groves McKeown and Olivia Sweeney doing all the female parts between them were incredibly motile, two human dynamos mixing grace with sinew, song with movement. It would be invidious to single out one cast member in this tight-knit, tautly choreographed show, so I won’t. Hats off to them all.

Now one of the dangers with this sort of busy, frenetic ensemble work – where everyone’s doing something absorbing or dramatically engrossing – is that you watch one thing and miss another. Keep your eye on the dental floss and might miss what the wood-chopper’s doing with his axe.

Or the moment when he sets a log on fire. Catherine Bennett kept everything in pretty much perpetual motion and actors Jonathan Nefydd and Richard Lynch, not perhaps known for their background in physical theatre, would have more than earned a good lie down after their mad exertions. They also declaimed the words with great clarity, variety and richness, such that you could probably hear them across the street in Elysium.

Pantomime

It was all relatively simply staged, with the audience moving from one space to another in what used to be the former Iceland store, starting with the slightly teasing opening sequence of actors behind gauze and microphones declaiming bits of the near-sacred text. This was about as conventional as it gets, and the departure point for a massively enjoyable hour and a quarter.

One highlight was the appearance of Mrs Ogmore Pritchard’s dead husbands – Mr Ogmore and Mr Pritchard – appearing as a sort of pantomime horse in shared pyjamas, while the soundtrack Stravinsky music added a pulsing beat to other slapstick routines making for a madcap mix. Who needs magic mushrooms when you can see the world entirely out of kilter from the relative comfort of your theatre seat, sorry bench.

The focus of the main space was a cube made of scaffolding, which, rocked back and fore could become the rigging of blind Captain Cat’s ship or transmute into buildings in Thomas’ imagined village.

The poetry of Dylan Thomas’ original wasn’t so much lost as magnified, although the overall tone was darker, more menacing, more hallucination than the benign, ultimately nostalgic vision of this Play for Voices.

New words were added but some things were almost sacrosanct, such as the iconic Eli Jenkins’ prayer, or the list of poisonous ingredients being quietly added to Mrs Pugh’s tea by her schoolmaster husband with his murderous thoughts.

All in all, a storming performance that hurricaned through the pages of Under Milk Wood like Storm Darragh. It was good to see the brilliantly iconoclastic Paul Davies has his Mojo back when it comes to smashing things up and then some.

I remember when he took a match to another work I loved, namely W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and the match turning into a blow-lamp. Under Milk Wood was incendiary theatre of a similar order, destroying one thing to make something unutterably new rise Phoenix-like from the ashes. Which is what a Volcano does, after all.