Review: Under Milk Wood, Volcano Theatre, Swansea

Pierre Donahue

Volcano Theatre’s adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood opened on the weekend at their Swansea High Street home.

Under Milk Wood along with all Dylan’s work entered the public domain this year. An important point in the case of Volcano Theatre, because in 1997 the company was banned from staging the play by the Dylan Thomas Estate, who said they had no right to mess with the text.

Copyright rule is quite simple: after 70 years the author, or those who inherit the copyright, have no more say on how it can be used. Volcano has wasted little time in returning for another go, unhindered by any such restraints.

The company is known for creating bold work that is often playful, inventive and surprising, and this is all of the above.

Featuring log chopping, plastic dolls and a man milking himself into an urn. This is a very weird Under Milk Wood.

In recent years only Kevin Allen’s film version has touched on the more subversive and surreal undertones in the text to this extent. Both versions have attempted to get under the respectable veneer it’s often presented as having.

Thomas’s original concept was for a play about a Welsh village certified as mad by government inspectors – “the village of the mad”, “the strangest town in Wales”. Clearly Volcano has latched on to this angle and run with it.

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Leave any preconceptions at the door. This is an otherworldly, at times nightmarish vision, that has a brazen disregard, and a strong resistance to what it’s become since 1953. It’s not sanitised, it’s raw, dirty and twisted.

The text has been ripped up, added to and reassembled mercilessly. Some could argue this leads to a loss of context, but only for those who know it. Or think they do.

This is not a nostalgic chocolate box adaptation. This is ripping up the template and doing something else with the pieces. This is punk rock Dylan on acid for the 21st century.

But underneath it, there is, in the reluctant acceptance of life, good and bad, a vision of Milk Wood that stays somewhat true to its heart. Disturbing yes, but also touching, humorous and fresh.

It’s intriguing to wonder what Dylan himself would make of it. Under Milk Wood was never properly finished, due to his untimely death aged just 39. Perhaps, liking a good dose of the surreal, he would have been chuckling at the absurdity of it all. One can only speculate.

Filtering back out into High Street, we pass a photograph of Thomas taken in the Bush Hotel, right opposite the venue, in October 1953. That night he drank his last Swansea pint, before catching the train to London and traveling on to America. He died in New York just three weeks later.

This adaptation will certainly split opinion. But over 70 years on, his work is still thought provoking, is reaching new audiences, and shows it has plenty of life left in it yet.